Abstract

At 830 pages, Racault's 1987 thèse d'état is the most substantial study of literary utopias since Victor Dupont's 1941 thesis. While the boundaries of Racault's work—from Veiras to Rousseau —seem reasonable, the author's knowledge of recent scholarly work in the field is lacking. Racault's study begins with a discussion of the "utopian mode," and then turns to the genre itself; first to contiguous literary forms like the robinsonnade, and then to the emergence of the utopia as a distinct genre. He analyzes in detail La Terre australe and Gulliver's Travels, before looking at the 18th century setting of utopian episodes within longer novels. This is a useful but not very original presentation of the utopia as a literary genre; certainly the most comprehensive study of the history of British and French utopias during the period 1675 to 1761