EDEBİYAT VE ÖTESİ MORE'UN ÜTOPYASINI BAĞLAMSALLAŞTIRMAK

This article attempts to foreground More's Utopia against the Renaissance backdrop of complex and unprecedented transformations both on the individual and the collective plain. It investigates the text as a literary artefact produced as much by its author as by the age imbibing the multifarious ambiguities and uncertainties of a transitional era. Located within the tradition of humanist social criticism, it posits an ideal state that is simultaneously absolutist and radically progressive, inclusive in format yet elitist in dissemination. A vehicle for self-cancellation and self-transference for More, Utopia thrives on the paradox and ambivalence resulting from an uneasy miscegenation of practical humanism and nascent bourgeois ideology. The contradictory strains of empirical objectivity and empire building; playful intellectual exercise and serious intent make More's 'no-place happyland' a site of ideological contestation which effectively establishes the linkages between a literary artefact and extra-literary considerations. The article focuses on the text's structural format, the genetics of composition, the extensive use of parerga, its secular yet hegemonic orientation, its insistence on commonwealth, abolition of money economy, and the continuous process of self-cancellation and self-assertion to suggest that despite radical ambivalence, More's Utopia, signals a transition of the English literary apparatus for critiquing social systems from adolescence to adulthood.