Form and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Utopian Narratives and Socio-Political Debate

During the ’long’ eighteenth century, marked by Spain’s experience of the Enlightenment, five major utopian texts devised ideal worlds as vehicles for questioning the political, economic, social, and religious status quo. Linking these narratives to a European utopian tradition, stretching from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Jonathan Swift’s take on the generic legacy in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the study examines not only their strikingly varied constructions of imaginary societies in a ...