A Pun That Named a Genre

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin in 1516 and gave his invented island a name that does not resolve cleanly in either Latin or English. Greek supplies two candidate roots that sound identical when Latinized: ou-topos, no place, and eu-topos, good place. More, a trained humanist who expected his readers to catch the wordplay, never states which he means, so the book's own title refuses to say whether its perfect commonwealth is offered as a genuine model or flagged, in the very name of the place, as nowhere that could exist. The ambiguity is not a modern reading imposed on an old text; More's own contemporaries argued about how seriously to take the book's political proposals almost immediately. Five centuries of utopian and dystopian fiction inherited that same unresolved question along with the name: whether an imagined society is a plan or a warning is very often left for the reader to decide, exactly as More left it.