To understand the seemingly direct link between utopianism and the USA and how it evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, this book traces the constituents of this relationship through a set of literary examples which have not been analysed together in this combination before. All of the authors examined discussed the link between nation and utopia – not by writing about a perfect society, but by exploring the attempts of communities to immediately live radically different lives. Signposting the respective communal history, the readings provide a literary perspective to communal studies, and a deeply necessary historicization for those who approached utopianism in the USA from a strictly literary perspective, or by merely referring to the Pilgrims/Puritans/the Founding Fathers. This book therefore highlights how the authors evaluated the utopian potential of the USA, and thus historicizes the development of the utopian imagination from a variety of perspectives.weiterlesen