In this loosely argued book, Sarah Hogan shows how “early English fictions of alterity demonstrate a range of subjective and class responses to the lived experience of emergent capitalism” (10). As Hogan's own italics suggest, range is the operative word here. Under the rubric of “utopian,” Hogan groups together works that are disparate in origin, intended audience, and even the language in which they were written, among them More's Latin Utopia (1516), Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Aemelia Lanyer's “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611), and Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Of course, Hogan's book is not the first on utopian literature to reflect the genre's own breadth, and she may be right to avoid too strictly limiting utopianism, which, quoting Ruth Levitas's The Concept of Utopia (1990), she defines at one point as a “desire for a better way of living” (151). But the differences among a Latin dialogue intended for a European humanist audience, a colonialist tract, a country-house poem, and a pamphlet about printing regulations are worthy of more extended notice than Hogan gives them. At points the commensurability of all these texts seems forced.

The organizing principle of the book is Marxist theory, in particular as it pertains to the “primitive accumulation” stage of capitalism. Citing a host of Marxist critics and theorists, Hogan wants to free Marxism from the stigma of a “supersessionary vision of progress” and demonstrate instead its awareness of the “uneven transition from feudalism to capitalism” (34). In practice her emphasis on this unevenness leads to overly schematic and yet still unclear readings of texts. In Book I of Utopia, for instance, the dialogue at Cardinal Morton's table figures as a revival of the “late feudal form” of estates satire (43), a formulation that may possess some truth but does not include any acknowledgement of this revival being embedded in a larger discussion of the favorite Renaissance humanist topos of advising the prince. Moreover, in what sense are the voices of the friar and lawyer at Morton's table “socially coded allegorical” (43) ones? Allegories of what? In general, Hogan's verbal conglomerations such as these could do with more explanation.

Nor does Hogan's apparent belief that anticlerical satire is inherently a holdover from the feudal period take into account the part that such satire would play throughout the sixteenth century. Hogan is dismissive of the “influence of Erasmus” (46), but she would do well to look more carefully at Praise of Folly (1511) and, in particular, its lengthy estates satire. Also, although she connects “late feudal” satire with economically motivated uprisings prior to the sixteenth century, she does not mention that uprisings continued to occur and to inspire fear soon after More's Utopia was published in 1516. Only now they were also fueled by the religious controversies of the Reformation. I counted one reference to the German Peasants’ War of the 1520s, but there is no discussion or acknowledgement of the Anabaptists.

Hogan argues that the relation between Spenser's utopian View and The Faerie Queene (1590) comes down to the representation of emergent capitalism in each work, brutally in A View and anachronistically in the poem that readers might be tempted to regard as a “quintessentially feudal epic” (120). But the meaning of “quintessentially feudal” as applied to an epic is not entirely clear (in what sense is epic even a feudal genre at all?), and it does not allow for much distinction between actual chivalric romances (surely the more quintessentially medieval genre) and the fashionable neo-feudal poetics that Spenser adopted from Ariosto and Tasso.

Her argument that the economic policies proposed for Ireland in A View represent a speeded-up version of the enclosure movement in England is interesting. But she provides no evidence for the work's “ideological alignment with primitive accumulation” in general (114). Just because A View envisions the total transformation of Ireland through violent, impoverishing policies, does not mean that the reader is supposed to see Ireland as an “ideal historical and literary site” upon which “wholesale transformation” (113) could be modeled in England were it not for pesky anti-enclosure laws. This needs to be shown, not assumed. But without this link, her case for A View as a utopian text becomes harder to sustain since a recurring feature of the genre is the possibility at least of applying strange, foreign remedies to native ills.

Hogan writes of a “historical praxis” (10) being important to her study, but the study's overall problem is its reliance on secondary sources and its lack of analysis based on original sources. Most of the history here is well-known material that comes from secondary sources or consists of generalizations about the emergence of capitalism. Missing is the kind of research that would enable her to make solid connections between text and context. Thus, for instance, she starts an interesting topic when she delves into the background of Lord Brooke, whom Milton cites as an advocate of toleration near the end of Areopagitica. But since she needs Brooke to figure as a representative of “aristocratic capitalism” in Milton's argument, she has to argue that Milton was “undoubtedly familiar” with Brooke's “integral participation” in various private colonial ventures (175). But I require more convincing. I would like to see some actual evidence of this familiarity.

Finally, several significant mistakes need to be pointed out. Hogan opposes Bacon's “Christian rewriting of the utopian form” (79) to the “non-Christian status” (77) of More's Utopia, but in fact Utopia is in the process of converting to Christianity, thanks to Raphael Hythlodaeus's visit there. Her point that Milton is opposed to Parliament's desire “to mandate the Protestant religion” (178) gives the mistaken impression that Milton's religious toleration extended to Catholics. Nor does anti-utopianism begin in the seventeenth century as her book suggests. The first early modern “anti-utopia” is arguably Sir Thomas Elyot's 1531 The Book of the Governor.

In short, while Hogan's book may interest those who already share her assumptions and accept the validity of her terminology, it is unlikely to convince anyone who does not.