He provides a body of work worth thinking through and thinking with. His concept of utopian narrative as both vision and practice, as participating in 'real' worlds, a force for change rooted in the social world 'as it is' and as it is becoming and is 'imagined,' succeeds wonderfully well his notion of the imperative of 'failure' as a resource of hope is deeply humane. 'Phillip Wegner's Imaginary Communities represents a major intervention in our understanding not merely of utopian literature, but the very ways in which we view our world. Insightful and provocative, Imaginary Communities will prove a valuable contribution to our thinking about the politics of imagination.'-Daniel Cottom, author of Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment

'In this important book, Wegner argues that the historical work done by utopian narratives should be reconsidered, interrogated, challenged-and continued. United States and the increasing militancy of the labor movement, the uneven successes and failures of the Russian Revolution of 1905, or the mid-century Cold War struggles.'-Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics Wegner demonstrates a wide-ranging yet lighthanded philosophical learnedness, an urgent political conscience, and a deeply historical sense that narrative utopias are like specters that haunt particular moments of upheaval, crisis, and contradiction within modernity: whether the threshold between the vestiges of feudal agrarian society and early modern English capitalism, conflicts between the new oligarchy of industrializing late 19th c. ' Imaginary Communities is a beautiful treatment of utopian narratives as the quintessential genre for figuring social space in the modern nation-state.

Imagined communities sparknotes