More After More: Essays Commemorating the Five Hundreth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, edited byKsenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński, and Krzysztof M. Maj
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Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków
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Preface by the Editors
The book “More After More. Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia ” is the first volume of the new publishing series “Frontiers of Nowhere” designed by Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków (factaficta.org/en) to probe the boundaries of fictional world-building and contemporary narrative theories.
More After More summarizes also three years of His Master’s Voice research project run by the editors of this volume and featuring three conferences in utopian and dystopian studies (in 2014, 2015, 2016), supported by Jagiellonian University’s Faculty of Polish Studies as well as AGH University of Science and Technology’s Faculty of Humanities. In the special 2016 issue of the esteemed Utopian Studies journal, On the Commemoration of the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s “Utopia”, the project was recognized in the report Utopian Studies in Poland: A Preliminary Survey by a Prof. Artur Blaim from the University of Gdańsk, whom we would like to express our many thanks for such kind support. Additionally, our project has greatly benefited from help and guidance offered to us by Prof. Gregory Claeys, Prof. Anna Łebkowska, Prof. Barbara Gąciarz, Prof. Zbigniew Pasek and Dr Danuta Glondys. It is also the reviewer of the volume, Prof. Paweł Frelik, whom we owe our gratitude for taking care of high-quality, in-depth reviews of all chapters, which have greatly helped to deliver the very best value from the contributed manuscripts. Last but not least, those successes would not be possible without the attendees of His Master’s Voice annual conferences, whose promising presentations were selected for further development as chapters for More After More. Thank you all and also to those of you whom we could not have included in this short list—you really help us shaping a true brave new world in the contemporary humanities.
The last edition of His Master’s Voice conference, More After More. Utopias & Dystopias 1516-2016, as well as the publication of this book, were supported by Villa Decius Association, greatly involved in a plethora of successful research projects partnered with the Visegrad Group, as well as by Utopian Studies Society’s international initiative “Utopia 500” (utopia500.net). We are proud to co-operate with people from both the academia and its outsides who support a community-driven spirit of research and work on transgressing the boundaries that lie foundations for walls and barriers—which are nothing but corner stones for future totalitarian dystopias and intellectual regimes.
Correspondingly, More After More, as well as the series “Frontiers of Nowhere”, is meant to be published in full open access and distributed freely in multiformat, as we believe that the current model of high-cost (for publishers, authors, and readers alike) academic publishing creates a false sense of elitism by restricting the access to knowledge only to the affordable few. Utopian studies deprived of the openness are an unintended contradiction—they rather shape a dystopia by walling off from the outside and enjoying a splendid isolation for a small group of beneficiaries.
We hope that this volume will grant the readers an insight to contemporary interdisciplinary research in utopian and dystopian studies across media, both in their philosophical and artistic dimension—and that it will inspire more research in this relatively small, but important branch of humanities.
Editors
Table of Contents
Preface