Pearl’s style is precise and engaging, and he presents his arguments with crispness without falling victim to the temptations of oversimplification.... The book succeeds admirably. Readers of this slim but convincing volume will find themselves thinking differently about the history of the novel.

Pearl’s clearly written work is based on wide reading and careful research; it offers admirable contextualization and sheds new light on the place of utopian thought and utopian writing within the history of the novel.

A well-written and well-researched study that offers a new and intriguing take on the much-studied origins of the British novel in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Utopian Geographies is going to be read, and not only because the writing is almost everywhere as clear as it is precise and engaging, although that is far more important than we sometimes consider. It is also because the work functions to both connect and differentiate, in substantial and illuminating ways, a number of crucial literary developments in the period it covers, including not only the births and transformations of genres but also the senescence of the geography-based utopia, a major literary form in several national literatures for two centuries—indeed for longer still, depending on your definition of 'utopia.'

Pearl shows how the novel performs a kind of phenomenal reduction on both history and geography, time and space. In the process, he breathes some new philosophical life into the old question of the rise of the novel.

In discussing the fate of the utopia located in distant seas in the period of its senescence, then, Pearl has isolated a narrative structure with important and wide-ranging implications for the history of British literature and the British empire

In Jason Pearl's eminently readable Utopian Geographies, wonder becomes intrinsic to travel fiction even as fiction itself becomes more credible and quotidian.... Utopian Geographies centralizes a rather charming paradox in which fiction disproves, at least on a cerebral register, the fantastic geographies that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries remained theoretically possible in the cartographic sense.

[I] find extremely insightful how he describes these novels of cultural and colonial encounter as deeply engaged in a discourse of friendship, a discourse that has begun receiving much more attention both in contemporary theory and scholarship.

Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel is an ambitious and original study of a group of texts that have been overlooked in studies of literary utopians and given short shrift in histories of the novel.

Pearl’s commendably unpretentious and direct prose style is not incompatible with a striking degree of scholarly ambition: his study deploys an extremely broad literary, historical, and theoretical apparatus... In this respect, it is likely to serve as a very important resource for those interested in the intersections between utopia and the early novel and their mediation by specific generic strands such as the pirate narrative, the desert island narrative, or the lunar voyage. The book’s fundamental insights are of great significance in enabling a fertile dialogue between scholars of the early novel, even beyond the English paradigm, and scholars concerned with the literary history and critical theory of utopia.

One of this study's resonant conclusions is that the utopian remainder persists as the dream or actuality of private fulfillment and mutually supportive community within the early novel long after all traces of the geographical utopia disappear.

A more naïve historiography of utopian fiction would posit that Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), too zany and self-conscious to be mainstream, is a final hurrah for the veritable line of works originating with Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, and that the realistic spaces, marked by colonial violence, of Behn’s and Defoe’s travel fictions, plus the skepticism of Swift, mark a terminus ad quem for utopia in the novel, at least until the rise of speculative future fiction. Utopia is boring enough for Rasselas to want out of it. It is therefore to Pearl’s credit that he shows that strains of utopianism predicated on exotic locations persist in the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Pearl approaches utopia as a genre rather than a concept and therefore sensibly tackles it as a contingent, flexible, and heuristic category.

Pearl's study is a timely and valuable contribution to conversations about how the novel reflected and shaped competing ideas about global and national identities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adding to work by Ros Ballaster, Srinivas Aravamudan, and others, Pearl makes a case for thinking of fiction as a framework by which writers navigated geographical and cultural difference and, by doing so, conceptualized England's place in a changing world. Pearl does so with a keen attention to the ambivalence attending the early modern utopian vision and illumines, in the process, tensions between self and other, individual and community that remain at the heart of "cosmopolitanism" and of our own thinking about the ethics and practice of global citizenship

Pearl's study is a timely and valuable contribution to conversations about how the novel reflected and shaped competing ideas about global and national identities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adding to work by Ros Ballaster, Srinivas Aravamudan, and others, Pearl makes a case for thinking of fiction as a framework by which writers navigated geographical and cultural difference and, by doing so, conceptualized England's place in a changing world. Pearl does so with a keen attention to the ambivalence attending the early modern utopian vision and illumines, in the process, tensions between self and other, individual and community that remain at the heart of "cosmopolitanism" and of our own thinking about the ethics and practice of global citizenship.

Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel is a cogent and impressive study of the nexus between the geographical imagination and fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which deserves a wide interdisciplinary audience in geography, history and literary studies.

This exemplary work very much accomplishes its mission: the provision of a better understanding of utopia.