The undergraduate thesis attempts to discuss the historical transformations of modern European utopian genre through an analysis of selected utopian literary texts. In particular, we focus on changes in the relationship between reality and utopian no-place throughout its history, and on the question of the place adopted by the utopian agent in the utopian text. In short, we are asking: Who desires in the utopia and for whom or, in other words: Does the utopian native also have his or her own utopia? In the first part of the thesis, we propose a definition of utopia based on the theories of utopia by Ruth Levitas and Fredric Jameson, and discuss some problems which arise with the attempts to define the utopian genre. We particularly focus on the problem of the recognisability of utopia through time in spite of the great variability of individual utopian elements. Then we attempt to follow the transformations of the utopian genre in the utopias by Thomas More, Denis Diderot, Alexander Bogdanov, a dystopia of Yevgeny Zamyatin and generically elusive novel Chevengur by Andrei Platonov. In this, granted very limited, sample from a rich tradition, the utopian genre emerges as distinctively weak: its individual works can maintain their relevance and coherence, and contained utopian space its endurance, only in a dialogue with other works of the utopian tradition and by reference to constants outside the genre, such as, for example, human nature.
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