Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The article analyses the obscure anonymous work Balmanno; The City of Our Quest and Its Social Problems (1906). It explores the text’s indebtedness to the classical literary utopia, namely by focusing on the depiction of the ideal city, and to the late nineteenth-century transformations of the genre, detectable in the social programme of the city of Balmanno aimed at the betterment of the human condition and the creation of industrious, healthy and moral citizens. Furthermore, the article discusses Balmanno’s criticism of contemporaneous social and economic relations in the context of Anglo-American socialism, and, more specifically, the cooperative propositions of Robert Owen and the models of socialist societies presented in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere.