The citizens of utopian Renaissance cities have in common the confidence in the power of reason and moral virtues. The purpose of the thesis is to prove that, in spite of the imaginative and unreal aspects of these utopian societies, they contain the prodroms of the modern societies. / The utopias of the Renaissance are projects of a new commonwealth, based on justice and education. The Italian peninsula of the XVI and early XVII century spawned several works belonging to this literary genre, inspired by Plato's Republic and initiated in England with Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Those considered in this thesis, besides Utopia, are: Francesco Doni's Il mondo savio e pazzo (1552), Francesco Patrizi's La Citta felice (1553), Ludovico Agostini's La Repubblica immaginaria (1580), Tommaso Campanella's La Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun) (1602) and Lodovico Zuccolo's Il Belluzzi (1621). / The thesis examines these six main literary works according to the concept of uchronie and escapism, the definitions of utopia by Karl Mannheim, J.C. Davis and Mikhail Bakhtin, the religious and Arcadian elements and the relationship between utopia and satire. The thesis analyzes three essential aspects of the utopian tales: city planning, relationship between man and woman, and education. The utopias of the Renaissance also reveal two different visions: one innovative if compared to the society of the time, and another, post-tridentina, oriented towards a return to more traditional values. The thesis examines the influence of More's work on the utopias of the Renaissance by analyzing and comparing a series of topics, like the title of the work, the narrator, fantastical names and ideas, the role of Plato, property and inequity, the choice of woman and the concept of beauty, daily labor, the function of God, and the concept of law. / The utopias of the Renaissance have various modern aspects: a utilitarian justice, a better place of woman in the society, the laicity of the government, the "rationality" of war, secularism, education, health, social justice, assistance to elderly. They also contain myopias, like an unrealistic economic model and a static society.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.102806 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Langford, Charles K. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Italian.) |
| Rights | © Charles K. Langford, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002589970, proquestno: AAINR32204, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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