The volume demonstrates the scope of utopian thinking and the enduring significance of past utopian fictions and historical events as potentially contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the contemporary reality. The essays examine the concept of utopia in a variety of contexts, such as philosophy, translation, music, social and political issues, like workers' movements and ideology, exploring global utopian fiction from medieval Persian poetry, through late 19th- and early 20th-century narratives, to contemporary Russian and British dystopian novels. Taken together, the texts attest to the lasting allure of the hopeful utopian visions as well as to the pertinence of the dystopian warnings contained in the darker fictive scenarios and social speculations.

Collected under the theme of Visions and Revisions, the papers included in this volume examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The first part gathers articles dealing with poetry of such epochs as the seventeenth century, the Victorian era and the modern times. Part two focuses on prose works representing such conventions and modes as the romance, the Gothic novel, the condition of England novel, Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, the science fiction novel and gay fiction. Part three concerns various aspects of British and American culture, including the new media, drama and journalism, and advertising. In its diversity the volume reflects the dynamics of change in literature and culture, enabling the readers to investigate the multifaceted canon.

The book discusses the evolution of the urban chronotope in the selected novels by Peter Ackroyd, an acclaimed British author. The examined narratives illustrate the transformation from the postmodern tenets of historiographic metafiction into a unique urban mythopoetics by means of a semiotic analysis.