Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of HistoryMarina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian textsThomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing Worldas a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that