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Barthes and Utopia explores the central role of utopias throughout the work of Roland Barthes, from demystification to structuralism, from textuality and sexual hedonism to his final preoccupation with love and mourning. Drawing on an unusually wide range of texts, Knight goes to the heart of Barthes's imaginative processes, his affective world, and his idiosyncratic value system. But, because utopia is the meeting point of Barthes's lifelong concern with the relationship between history, language, and sexuality, her study also inserts Barthes's work into larger political and theoretical concerns, in particular into ongoing debates around Orientalism and homosexuality.

"One of the best studies yet written about Barthes. Knight takes the figure of utopia as a guiding element in Barthes's work and demonstrates the many ways in which it can provide fresh perspectives on both the most well-known texts and the lesser known articles and essays. Knight's book is immensely informative about all aspects of Barthes's work."(Graham Allen)

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