New and Imagined Worlds in the English Renaissance

Catalog description

In the centuries following the “discovery” of the Novus Mundus or “New World,” European playwrights, poets and thinkers created a startling diversity of their own “new” or imagined worlds, which sometimes took license from fantastic contemporary reports of overseas discoveries. How do imagined lands comment upon our own? What freedoms and possibilities arise from the ability to imagine alternative worlds?