Author: Bronwen Price
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This volume of eight new essays by leading scholars provides a stimulating dialogue between a range of critical perspectives. Encompassing the fields of cultural history, history of science, literature, and politics, the collection explores The New Atlantis' complex location within Bacon's oeuvre and its negotiations with cultural debates of the past and present. Often regarded as the apotheosis of Bacon's ideas through its depiction of an advanced “scientific” society, it is also read as a seminal work of science fiction.
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
Author: Bronwen Price
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This volume of eight new essays by leading scholars provides a stimulating dialogue between a range of critical perspectives. Encompassing the fields of cultural history, history of science, literature, and politics, the collection explores The New Atlantis' complex location within Bacon's oeuvre and its negotiations with cultural debates of the past and present. Often regarded as the apotheosis of Bacon's ideas through its depiction of an advanced “scientific” society, it is also read as a seminal work of science fiction.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This volume of eight new essays by leading scholars provides a stimulating dialogue between a range of critical perspectives. Encompassing the fields of cultural history, history of science, literature, and politics, the collection explores The New Atlantis' complex location within Bacon's oeuvre and its negotiations with cultural debates of the past and present. Often regarded as the apotheosis of Bacon's ideas through its depiction of an advanced “scientific” society, it is also read as a seminal work of science fiction.
The New Atlantis and The City of the Sun
Author: Francis Bacon
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486430829
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Two authors from The Age of Reason and Enlightenment, in keeping with the spirit of their times, envisioned their own philosophical and intellectual utopias. Tomasso Campanella, a Calabrian monk, published The City of the Sun in 1623, and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis appeared in 1627. Campanella was a student of logic and physics who formulated the first scientifically based socialistic system — one that furnished a model for subsequent ideal communities. Bacon focused on politics and philosophy, emphasizing the duty of the state toward science. Despite the authors' differences in setting and treatment, each of these 17th-century classics mirrors the period's prevailing thought, reflecting the idealism of an age and its revolutionary trends in philosophy.
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486430829
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Two authors from The Age of Reason and Enlightenment, in keeping with the spirit of their times, envisioned their own philosophical and intellectual utopias. Tomasso Campanella, a Calabrian monk, published The City of the Sun in 1623, and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis appeared in 1627. Campanella was a student of logic and physics who formulated the first scientifically based socialistic system — one that furnished a model for subsequent ideal communities. Bacon focused on politics and philosophy, emphasizing the duty of the state toward science. Despite the authors' differences in setting and treatment, each of these 17th-century classics mirrors the period's prevailing thought, reflecting the idealism of an age and its revolutionary trends in philosophy.
Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel
Author: Jason H. Pearl
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography. Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography. Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.
The New Atlantis
Dark Skies
Author: Daniel Deudney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019090335X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019090335X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
Geography and Enlightenment
Author: David N. Livingstone
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226487212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
Book Description
Exploring both the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon and the place of geography in the Enlightenment, 14 papers from a July 1996 conference in Edinburgh survey the many ways in which the world of the long 18th century was shaped through map, text, exploration, and argument and within and across spatial and intellectual borders. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226487212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
Book Description
Exploring both the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon and the place of geography in the Enlightenment, 14 papers from a July 1996 conference in Edinburgh survey the many ways in which the world of the long 18th century was shaped through map, text, exploration, and argument and within and across spatial and intellectual borders. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History
Author: Marina Leslie
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801434006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts--Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World--as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form among many available for reading historically but as a privileged form or methodological paradigm. Rather than approach utopia by mapping out a fixed set of formal features, or by tracing the development of the genre, Leslie elaborates a history of utopia as critical practice. Moreover, by taking every reading of utopia to be as historically symptomatic as the literary production it assesses, her book integrates readings of these three English Renaissance utopias with an analysis of the history and politics of reading utopia. Throughout, Leslie considers utopia as a fictional enactment of historical process and method. In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801434006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts--Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World--as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form among many available for reading historically but as a privileged form or methodological paradigm. Rather than approach utopia by mapping out a fixed set of formal features, or by tracing the development of the genre, Leslie elaborates a history of utopia as critical practice. Moreover, by taking every reading of utopia to be as historically symptomatic as the literary production it assesses, her book integrates readings of these three English Renaissance utopias with an analysis of the history and politics of reading utopia. Throughout, Leslie considers utopia as a fictional enactment of historical process and method. In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.
Empires of Knowledge
Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429867921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429867921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.
The Triumph of Human Empire
Author: Rosalind Williams
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226899586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descendants of the lost realm of Atlantis, who had organized themselves to seek “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon’s make-believe island was not an empire in the usual sense, marked by territorial control; instead, it was the center of a vast general expansion of human knowledge and power. Rosalind Williams uses Bacon’s island as a jumping-off point to explore the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination. Confronting an intensely humanized world was a singular event of consciousness, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers of the late nineteenth century: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As the century drew to a close, these writers were unhappy with the direction in which their world seemed to be headed and worried that organized humanity would use knowledge and power for unworthy ends. In response, Williams shows, each engaged in a lifelong quest to make a home in the midst of human empire, to transcend it, and most of all to understand it. They accomplished this first by taking to the water: in life and in art, the transition from land to water offered them release from the condition of human domination. At the same time, each writer transformed his world by exploring the literary boundary between realism and romance. Williams shows how Verne, Morris, and Stevenson experimented with romance and fantasy and how these traditions allowed them to express their growing awareness of the need for a new relationship between humans and Earth. The Triumph of Human Empire shows that for these writers and their readers romance was an exceptionally powerful way of grappling with the political, technical, and environmental situations of modernity. As environmental consciousness rises in our time, along with evidence that our seeming control over nature is pathological and unpredictable, Williams’s history is one that speaks very much to the present.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226899586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descendants of the lost realm of Atlantis, who had organized themselves to seek “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon’s make-believe island was not an empire in the usual sense, marked by territorial control; instead, it was the center of a vast general expansion of human knowledge and power. Rosalind Williams uses Bacon’s island as a jumping-off point to explore the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination. Confronting an intensely humanized world was a singular event of consciousness, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers of the late nineteenth century: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As the century drew to a close, these writers were unhappy with the direction in which their world seemed to be headed and worried that organized humanity would use knowledge and power for unworthy ends. In response, Williams shows, each engaged in a lifelong quest to make a home in the midst of human empire, to transcend it, and most of all to understand it. They accomplished this first by taking to the water: in life and in art, the transition from land to water offered them release from the condition of human domination. At the same time, each writer transformed his world by exploring the literary boundary between realism and romance. Williams shows how Verne, Morris, and Stevenson experimented with romance and fantasy and how these traditions allowed them to express their growing awareness of the need for a new relationship between humans and Earth. The Triumph of Human Empire shows that for these writers and their readers romance was an exceptionally powerful way of grappling with the political, technical, and environmental situations of modernity. As environmental consciousness rises in our time, along with evidence that our seeming control over nature is pathological and unpredictable, Williams’s history is one that speaks very much to the present.