Utopia Analysis

Buckle your seatbelts, Shmoopers, because the setting in Utopia is a whole web of goodness. One level of setting is where the action of the primary narration takes place; in other words, the stuff...

Our author, Thomas More, is also our first person narrator. Yep. How's that for confusing?This wasn't all that uncommon at the time. In fact, since discovery of the new world was an actual historic...

Utopia essentially invented a new genre: Utopian, or Dystopian, Literature. Have an inkling of what that might mean? It's when you use elements of fantasy and science-fiction to describe a place th...

Let's be honest. Utopia is not filled with dramatic emotion, but that doesn't mean our faithful narrator Thomas More doesn't care deeply about what he's hearing, or for that matter, that Hythloday...

Fun and GamesPlayful? Utopia? Yes, really. Just because some of the issues at hand are serious, doesn't mean More isn't having fun with this whole invent-your-own world thing. You know all those fu...

It's kind of big deal, actually. Such a big deal, that an entire genre is based on its title: Utopia. Utopia is a name More invented by combining the ancient Greek adverb "not" (ou) with the Greek...

The ending of Utopia is famously ambiguous, and also, a bit anti-climactic. So don't worry if you finished the book with a bit of a huh? For centuries, people have found the ending frustrating beca...

Utopia may sound like your average travel fantasy, but it's actually about some pretty deep stuff. The text investigates some heavy-hitting questions of political philosophy, some of which are very...

Traveler meets TravelerWhile traveling in Europe, Thomas More meets his old friend Peter Giles and makes a new friend, Raphael Hythloday. Since they all love chatting and sharing their experience,...

Raphael Hythloday is a smart, smart guy, but he's bored with the regular old day-to-day and disenchanted with the political corruption and economic inequality of Europe. Luckily for him, there's lo...

Thomas More, Peter Giles, and Raphael Hythloday meet up and decide to have a philosophical chat. Sitting in Peter Giles' garden, they debate how effective philosophy can be in changing political po...

When More wrote his first draft of Utopia, he sent a copy to his pal (and big-deal Renaissance thinker) Erasmus, who made a bunch of little, marginal notes for himself. When he returned the text to...

While "sexy" is probably not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Utopia, there are some strange marriage practices and rules for sexual conduct that Hythloday spends some time discus...

Virgil, Aeneid (1.10; 1.12)Homer, Odyssey (1.10; 1.12)Plato (1.10)Seneca (1.10)Cicero (1.10)Sallust (1.18)Plato, Republic (1.28, 36, 38)Gospel of Luke, New Testament (1.27)Many Old Testament Refere...