Hardcover. 1st edition hardcover with dustjacket 1986 Univ. of Georgia. Small black mark and abraded area inside front. Front jacket flap creased. Text very clean; pages bright; binding tight. 193pp, Index, Notes, Bibliography. Language: English. '[O]ffers us 4 theoretical chapters: Introduction: Readers in Utopia; Disputed Boundaries: Defining the Utopian Terrain; The Role of the Readers: Between Possibility and Necessity; and Conclusion: The Efficacy of Contradictions--and 3 more specific chapters focusing on a few examples of 3 types of literary utopias: the eutopia (More); the dystopia (Huxley, Orwell, and especially Zamiatin); and the ambiguous utopia (Wells, Piercy, and Le Guin). The primary goal of both the theoretical and the case study chapters is to define ideal readers of literary utopias and objects worthy of their efforts --viz., ideal utopian works. In part Ruppert's ideal readers are defined by negation. They are not primarily interested in extracting from fixed texts blueprints for social application or extracting constructs of ideal societies that become the stuff of literary or intellectual histories. Hence social activist readers and intellectual historians such as the Manuels are less-than-ideal readers. Neither are ideal readers ingenious readers who perceive utopias as playful and symbolic fictions that resolve or at least harmonize the conflicts of the real world. (Ruppert places Northrop Frye in this category.) Instead ideal readers perceive utopian texts as invitations to discover questions, conflicts, and utopian concepts relevant to their own reality and questions relevant to the imaginary better world they perceive in the text....'--Kenneth M. Roemer, from 'Prescriptions for Readers (and Writers) of Utopias' in Science Fiction Studies no. 44, March 1988.