During the ’long’ eighteenth century, marked by Spain’s experience of the Enlightenment, five major utopian texts devised ideal worlds as vehicles for questioning the political, economic, social, and religious status quo. Linking these narratives to a European utopian tradition, stretching from Thomas More’s
Utopia
(1516) to Jonathan Swift’s take on the generic legacy in
Gulliver’s Travels
(1726), the study examines not only their strikingly varied constructions of imaginary societies in a period characterized by reformist thinking, but also explores the foundations of Iberian utopianism in the social experiments carried out in the Spanish American colonies. Equally significantly, it demonstrates how in Spanish utopian thought the spirit of Enlightenment reformism interacted with the moral philosophy of Roman Catholicism. No earlier work has provided a full-length study of the evolution of eighteenth-century Spanish utopian literature, integrating a hitherto undervalued aspect of Hispanic culture into a Europe-wide, literary-political tradition.
Carla Almanza-Gálvez is an independent scholar specializing in utopian fiction and transatlantic Enlightenment.