Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular―and thus exclusive and inimitable.
Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers―Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne―construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds―for themselves alone.
Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Utopias of One

Literature & Fiction

Kotin, Joshua

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular--and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers--Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne--construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds--for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

And so, beginning in September of 2020, and carrying on, with occasional interruptions and dilations, until the next April, we read from the first page of J.H. Prynne's PARKLAND to the last. After that first pass through the nineteen sections, we gathered all the emails and printed them out. In their raw form they told the story of an evolving, dialogic critical encounter, written not from the omniscient vantage of the reader who has got to the last page, but in real time and close to the ground--each linguistic event, as we encountered it, blocking our view of the pages ahead. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Essay. Literary Criticism.

The Parkland Mysteries

Dolven, Jeff

Essays & Correspondence

The Last Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kotin, Joshua. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kotin, Joshua

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kotin, Joshua. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Utopias of One

Utopias of One

The Parkland Mysteries