Utopian fiction was an important genre in the 18th century. It was during this period that a phenomenon appeared, the merging of utopian writing "per se" with other fictional genres, such as the increasingly dominant novel. Beginning with a survey of the recurrent topics in utopian writing - power structures in the state, money, food, sex, the role of women, birth, education and death - the text aims to bring together canonical 18th-century texts containing powerful utopian elements, such as "Robinson Crusoe", "Gullivers Travels" and "Rasselas", the less familiar works, to examine the reworking of these topics in a new context.
