TY - BOOK AU - Kotin,Joshua TI - Utopias of One SN - 9780691176710 AV - PN56.U8 K68 2020 U1 - 809.93372 23 PY - 2017///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - Utopias in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction. Utopias of One --; PART I. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA --; Learning from Walden --; W.E.B. Du Bois's Hermeticism --; PART II. THE SOVIET UNION --; Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Utopian Anti - Utopianism --; Anna Akhmatova's Complicity --; PART III. THE WORLD --; Wallace Stevens's Point of View --; Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese --; Utopias of two --; Acknowledgments --; Note on Transliteration & Translation --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular-and thus exclusive and inimitable.Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers-Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne-construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds-for themselves alone.Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400887866?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400887866 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781400887866/original ER -