This chapter, which introduces the collection, maps a distinctively British utopian impulse in literature and culture from the end of World War II to the present. Drawing on philosophical works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, the chapter explores the utopian impulse in literary works, films, zines, poetry, art, and music. It situates these works in their materialist contexts, from the swinging 1960s and more apocalyptic 1970s to the political riots of 1980s British cities and blistering critiques of Thatcherite neoliberalism that persisted into the 1990s and early 2000s, concluding with the utopian turn in the 2010s and 2020s as financial, ecological, and political crises gripped the British state. Taking its inspiration from the Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams and British postcolonial scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the chapter argues that British countercultures and subcultures have yielded a powerful utopian surplus that persists into the present. Like an explosive, the image Bloch privileges for utopian rupture, the texts, novelists, filmmakers, poets, zine-makers, and playwrights explored in this collection rip through the prevailing discourse to reveal a utopian surplus; ‘that which is not yet fulfilled’.

This chapter analyses the utopian possibilities of the British counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural aesthetics and politics responded to contemporary crises in urban planning, ecological destruction, and fractured identities of nation and class – issues that remain pressing in the twenty-first century. Tracing the origins of post-punk utopianism, the chapter argues that the ambiguity of the British counterculture’s utopian possibilities may be explored via an excavation of its class basis. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter analyses the 1974 BBC TV play Penda’s Fen. It suggests that Penda’s Fen contains conflicting utopian visions, reflecting the differing class factions that comprised the counterculture and anticipated the neoliberal present of twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this iconic TV play has lessons to teach us in the contemporary moment. Its class politics, which explores homosexual desire between working-class and middle-class characters, offers a utopian image of cross-class solidarity and sexuality set against the backdrop of a mythic vision of Britain.

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.

This chapter argues that Scottish author Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is an exemplary critical feminist utopia. Touching on many of the literary utopian genre’s foundational tensions and ambiguities, Mitchison’s novel offers readers a world of freely accessible abortions, inter-racial and multi-gendered parenting, queer and alien sexual practices, and universal child-led education. Despite the obviously utopian contours of this speculative narrative world, however, Mitchison’s narrative uses the utopian society for its backdrop of spacefaring alien adventure. By creating a utopian society, only to leave it behind as her protagonists visits stranger alien worlds, the chapter argues that Mitchison manages to maintain a focus on the utopian missing ‘something’, even whilst depicting a feminist utopia. Rather than arriving at a static utopian locus, Mitchison’s eponymous spacewoman journeys in an ongoing process of utopian searching, in which many of the literary genre’s pleasures and dangers are laid bare. With its focus on a female scientist attempting to avoid the harm historically perpetuated on alien flora and fauna by British colonial scientific institutions, Mitchison’s text reveals the utopian prospect of an anti-colonial feminist science.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

Late medieval Christians had constructed a complex method for the discernment of spirits through which mystical encounters could be experienced, scrutinized, and censured. This chapter explores how two famous Counter-Reformation mystics – Teresa of Ávila and Caterina de’ Ricci – successfully articulated their experiences of the divine, setting out their own advice for discernment in the face of growing ecclesiastical hostility.