This is the first attempt by a major European scholar to include rich Chinese materials in a remarkably innovative study of utopia as a literary genre. Well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written, this book will appeal to anyone interested in history of ideas, comparative literature, and East-West cross-cultural studies. Zhang Longxi, author of Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. Zhang Longxi is Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation City University of Hong Kong Foreign Member The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. , "Perfect Worlds is a scholarly tour de force, splendidly accomplished by one of the great comparatists of our time. With his customary clarity, deploying his profound expertise in both European and Chinese writing, Douwe Fokkema champions the significance of utopian fiction as a major genre of world literature." Michel Hockx (SOAS, University of London)

Preface
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction
2. The Utopia of Thomas More
3. From Rational Eutopia to Grotesque Dystopia
4. Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai
5. Enlightenment Utopias
6. Orientalism: European Writers Searching for Utopia in China
7. Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias
8. Small-Scale Socialist Experiments, or “The New Jerusalem in Duodecimo”
9. Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? and Dostoevsky’s Dystopian Foresight
10. When Socialist Utopianism Meets Politics…
11. Bellamy’s Solidarity and Its Feminist Mirror Image in Herland
12. Chinese Occidentalism: The Nostalgia for a Utopian Past Gives Way to the Idea of Progress
13. H. G. Wells and the Modern Utopia
14. Dystopian Fiction in the Soviet Union, Proletkult and Socialist-Realist Utopianism
15. Mao Zedong’s Utopian Thought and the Post-Mao Imaginative Response
16. Utopias, Dystopias, and Their Hybrid Variants in Europe and America since World War I
17. Concluding Observations

References
Subject Index
Index of Names