Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France

In the decades after the French Revolution, philosophers, artists, and social scientists set out to chart and build a way to a new world and their speculative blueprints circulated like banknotes in a parallel economy of ideas. Examining representations of ideal societies in nineteenth-century French culture, Daniel Sipe argues that the dream-image of the literary or art-historical utopia does not disappear but rather is profoundly altered by its proximity to the social utopianism of the day. Sipe focuses on this persistent afterlife in utopias ranging from Franois-Ren de Chateaubriands Amerindian utopia in Atala (1801) to the utopian spoof of J.J. Grandvilles illustrated novel Un autre monde (1844). He proposes a new reading of Etienne Cabets seminal utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie (1840) and offers an original perspective on the gendered utopias of technological inspiration that authors such as Charles Barbara and Auguste Villiers de lIsle-Adam penned in the second half of the century. In addition, Sipe considers utopias or important readings of the centurys rampant utopianism in, among others, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Thophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Courbet. His book provides the historical context for comprehending the significance and implications of this enigmatic afterlife in nineteenth-century utopian art and literature.