Abstract EN:

This thesis brings together the historiography of the european discovery of the "austral" regions ( the southern hemisphere in general and, in particular, the last unknown regions of australasia and the south pacific), and the literary criticism of the "classical" utopias based on this problematical history, from classical antiquity until the eighteenth century. The meaning to be drawn from this temporary alignment of literary and geographical history on the same problematic is analysed as a contribution to the understanding of the culture-historical "involution" produced in the enlightenment, as a rupture with cultural organicity in general and, as literary-historical side-effect, a rupture with the tradition of utopian writing investing the theme of geographical problemicity. The "austral" aspect of classical utopian thematics is thus examined in terms of its significance to the history of ideas: as emblematic of the play of relations of social space, by way of a metaphorical, satirical association of the hemispherical and sexual modalities of structuring binarity; which the thesis formalizes as an "inter-collective erotics". This perspective can be seen to have theorized ( in a pre-scientific way ) the essential determining relation between the geographical and sociological aspects of western expansion and, at the limit, of human evolution itself: as phenomena arisinq out of the inter-collective territorial relation.