Given the tradition that the Analects contain nothing superfluous, I was puzzled by the verses re length of the night-gown and the predilection for ginger. . . . Those passages of the Analects are, as I see it, there to insist that Confucius was a Chinaman, not born of a dragon, not in any way supernatural, but remarkably possessed of good sense. —Ezra Pound, The Confucian Analects [I]s the surest way to a fructive western idea the misunderstanding of an eastern one? —Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era...

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. [1] As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia. [2] Instead, many early readers chose to read it as the very opposite, as an anti-utopia or dystopia—a form centrally defined by its negative reaction against any attempt at realizing or imagining a utopia. Identifying...