The first full-length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. Specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house.

Nicole Pohl is Lecturer in English in the School of Cultural Studies, University College Northampton, UK.

Contents: Introduction; The architecture of paradise: Eden and Jerusalem; 'An emblem of themselves': the country house as Utopia; 'In this sacred space': convents and academies; Fatima's house: oriental voyage Utopias; Afterword; Works cited; Index.