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Published: 2025-12-31
Vol. 26 No. 2 (tom w przygotowaniu) (2025)

Journeys into the Depths of Utopia – Early Modernity versus Modernity

Kinga Wyskiel-Szandecka Logo ORCID
Section: Essays and Articles
https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2025.26.08

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of literary journeys to utopian worlds. The motif of travel – present in utopias since the time of Thomas More and continued and transformed in various ways by other authors of the genre – has become one of the key elements organizing utopian narratives. Using several selected utopian works as examples: More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis fragments of Adam Mickiewicz’s The History of the Future, Anna Zahorska’s novel Utopia, Herbert George Wells’s Men Like Gods, and Antoni Lange’s Miranda, the text presents differences in travelling to those lands. These differences can be observed when considering two eras that represent milestones in the development of utopian thought. In the early modern period, fascination with utopia grew out of a series of expeditions and geographical discoveries, whereas in the modern era, such thinking came to be associated primarily with a belief in civilizational progress.

Keywords:

utopia , journey , progress , the early modern period , modernity

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Wyskiel-Szandecka, K. (2025). Journeys into the Depths of Utopia – Early Modernity versus Modernity. Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne [Silesian Journal of Polish Studies], 26(2 (tom w przygotowaniu), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2025.26.08

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Vol. 26 No. 2 (tom w przygotowaniu) (2025)
Published: 2026-06-17

ISSN: 2084-0772
eISSN: 2353-0928
Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press
Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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