Utopian Sentiments

Abstract This chapter begins by examining how some writers have imagined the role literature would play in an achieved utopia. Noting that their imagined utopians tend to avoid being swept up in sentimental feeling when reading, it goes on to observe that sentimentality presents a problem for utopian productivity by virtue of its excess and capacity for misdirection. It further shows how the problem of sentimentality points to the potentially destabilizing effects on utopia of feeling in general. Engaging with key theoretical and historical work on sentimentality, it closes by noting that sentimentality threatens to undermine a crucial premise of utopian thinking, the assumption that problem-solving is necessarily valuable.