Satire et anti-utopie au début du XVIIe siècle
Satire and Anti-Utopia in the Early 17th Century

Summary/Abstract: Joseph Hall’s parody of the utopian conventions, Mundus alter et idem (1605), has acquired a reputation for being an early example of anti-utopian writing. However, Hall was not the only author of his time to use the utopian form or certain utopian themes as means of depicting imaginary societies in which vice and chaos had became the norm of social behaviour. This paper discusses two other such texts, Artus Thomas’ L’Isle des Hermaphrodites (1605) and Jean de la Pierre’s Le grand empire de l’un et l’autre monde (1625), besides Mundus alter et idem, in order to determine their possible relation to an early modern tradition of the Menippean satire and to reassess their place within the anti-utopian sub-genre.

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