With the publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, it may have seemed as if England had found the place whereby its most optimistic of futures could be imagined. But the truth is that there was already a serious contender for that role: Eden. To a modern reader this may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn't Edenic literature in some sense just the opposite of the utopian genre in that the concern is not with an imagined future but rather...