Lacan, Foucault, and the malleable subject in early modern English utopian literature / Dan Mills.

Section 1. Introductory matters -- Introducing utopia -- "If only this were some day possible": Thomas More's Utopia and Lacan's Three registers of subjectivity -- Stelth self on the shelf: surveillance, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and symbolic subjectivity -- Power is knowledge: surveillance, biopower and linguistic subjectivity in John Eliot's Christian commonwealth -- Section 2. The utopian symbolic -- Linguistic subjectivity and linguistic utopia in Francis Lodwick's A country not named -- "Out of the authority of the Arabians": orientalism and utopian intellectual history in Robert Burton's Anatomy of melancholy -- Gerrard Winstanley's utopian mission -- Section 3. The utopian inaginary -- Margaret Cavendish's Book of imaginary beings: philosophical animals and physiognomic philosophers in The blazing world -- Joseph Hall's Mundus alter et idem and geo-saterical indictment of the English Crown -- James Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana and typhographical utopia -- Section 4. The three utopian reals -- Pornographic miscegenation and dystopic apocalypse in Henry Neville's Isle of pines -- Conclusions and an elephant in the room.

"Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan's and Foucault's thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan's Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real"-- Provided by publisher.

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