SOURCE: "Saturnalia, Satire, and Utopia," in The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre, The University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 3-24.

In the following essay, Elliott presents argues that "utopia is the secularization of the myth of the Golden Age, " and that "utopia and satire are ancestrally linked in the celebration of Saturn."

Engels once spoke of Charles Fourier, the nineteenth century's complete utopian, as one of the greatest satirists of all time. The conjunction may seem odd; we normally think of utopia as associated with the ideal, satire with the actual, which (man and his institutions being what they are) usually proves to be the sordid, the foolish, the vicious. In fact, however, the two modes—utopia and satire—are linked in a complex network of genetic, historical, and formal relationships. Some of these I propose to trace.

First, a tangle of genetic lines which, in...