Abstract
After describing the current crisis in historiography and defining utopianism, I look at theories of history from a utopian perspective. I do so by examining three central concepts (historical rupture, historical erasure, and historical fictionality) by means of three utopian texts - Edward Bellamy's Looking backward (1888), Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale (1985), and Richard Gooch's America and the Americans in 1833-4 (1834; 1995). I then move on to look at the practice of history in terms of these concepts with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-6 as my analytical and exemplary focus. I conclude by suggesting how utopianism offers for historiography a way out of the paradox of the ever-present.