Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land.

Where is the ideal commonwealth to be found? In his prefatory letter to Utopia, Thomas More slyly reminded Peter Gilles that they had forgotten to ask, and Hythloday to tell them, "in what part of the new world Utopia is situate." Today critics are still asking, usually with greater seriousness than More, for utopia's "situation."

Through the eighteenth century, according to David Fausett's study, the answer for Europeans was the great southern land. In the early modern era, the West persistently located its vision of utopia in "terra australis incognita," the legendary lands of the southern hemisphere. The mysteriousness of austral lands enabled an original and "geo-spatial" species of utopian writing - a discourse lost to Europe after Cook's exploration of Antarctica (1772-75) rendered the unknowable austral lands known. Excursions to the southern continent in the seventeenth century augmented Europe's mystification of the world's other half, allowing the southern hemisphere briefly to flourish as a site of contestation in seventeenth-century literature.

Readers of Fausett's study will find an historical overview of European voyages to the southern hemisphere as well as a survey of the various literary types treating the "austral theme." Fausett surveys the representation of southern lands in centuries of European literature, beginning with Hellenistic and Roman geographies and the persistence through the middle ages of ancient ideas about the world's "other half." Two ways of representing the foreign - the empirical and the "culturally conditioned" - contribute to "early austral fiction," which Fausett traces back as far as Indian Ocean fictions of the Hellenistic Age, including Phaeacia in Homer's Odyssey, Plato's Atlantis, Theopompos of Chios's utopia from the mid-fourth-century B.C., Euhemerus's Sacred Inscription, Iambulus's Heliopolis, and Lucian of Samosota's True History. Fausett's survey of Roman and medieval utopianism (or rather, its absence) culminates in a discussion of the "rehabilitation" of utopian literature in the Renaissance. Surprisingly, More's Utopia resurfaces here as an austral fiction because of its alleged "equatorial setting." Such a designation is puzzling in light of strong evidence for More's (and Hythloday's) interest in the Americas. More troubling, Fausett's hints of "subordinated aboriginal cults" and the revival of a "solar theme" do not open the text to new readings; it is not clear, even if we accept Fausett's claim, how Utopia is changed by reading it as an austral fiction.

This problem continues in subsequent chapters. Fausett organizes his discussion by themes: the antipodean theme in the anonymous Kingdom of Antangil, Richard Brome's The Antipodes, and Bacon's New Atlantis; the mixing of fact and fiction in The Voyage of Bontekoe and The Isle of Pines; exoticism in The History of the Sevarites; and the quest for certainty in de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connu (1676). While Fausett makes an important contribution here in introducing and summarizing a series of little-known prose fictions, his attempt to place these works under the category of the "austral" (a theme that remains disappointingly elusive) is more problematic.

Perhaps most confusing is that Fausett alternately (and at times uncritically) interweaves history with what Edward Said has called "imaginary geography." The settings of early utopias are given more weight than their complexity as discursive kinds. Fausett's emphasis on the location of utopia (a topoi that is almost always self-consciously riddling) forces certain connections while curtailing others. Since the "austral theme" appears to reveal more about is authors than the lands they dreamed of, it seems crucial to ask questions of the cultures that produced it. But Fausett makes no distinctions between England, France, or the Netherlands in his pronouncements on the seventeenth century's desire to "embrace the new empiricism." Given the struggles between England and the Netherlands for control of such antipodean worlds - to take just one example - it is hard to read these nations' imaginative records as collective. History is rendered too much the same in places and too different in others. Can we really suppose that the West's imaginative representation of the great southern lands varied so little in over a thousand years? And can we accept that utopian discourse vanishes after Cook's voyages of discovery? When Lewis Carroll's Alice falls down the rabbit hole she muses that she might fall entirely through the earth and come out its other side - to "the antipathies," she says. While Fausett's study usefully reminds us that the antipodean theme bears close attention, his study needs a firmer focus. A stronger understanding of the world that believed it stood right side up would help readers to appreciate the construction of the antipodean.

AMY BOESKY Boston College