Francis Bacon's classic technological utopia brought to life for the modern sonic arts. In the early seventeenth century, at the very end of his life, the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon wrote a utopian fable called New Atlantis, containing an uncanny presentiment of twentieth-century electronic music. Now, four hundred years ago, music writer Robert Barry digs into the significance of that tale for the history of music, media, science and the senses. New Atlantis marked a significant turning point in the history of utopian literature -- not to mention the pre-history of science fiction, and even modern science itself. At the heart of the island paradise stumbled upon by Bacon's stranded sailors is a research institute called Bensalem where the locals practice "all sounds and their generation". The passage was sufficiently inspiring that Daphne Oram quoted it in full and pinned it to the wall of the newly opened BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957. Newly re-united with extracts from the Sylva Sylvarum, a notebook of real experiments that New Atlantis originally came bound with in the seventeenth century, this new publication seeks to bring Bacon's ideas to life for a new generation of artists and scholars engaged in the sonic arts, media archeology, and science studies. New Atlantis is presented with a brand new introduction by author and musician Robert Barry, which lays out the continuing relevance of Bacon's utopia for the place of sound and technology in the arts to this day.

In the early seventeenth century, at the very end of his life, the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon wrote a utopian fable called New Atlantis, containing an uncanny presentiment of twentieth-century electronic music. Now, four hundred years ago, music writer Robert Barry digs into the significance of that tale for the history of music, media, science and the senses. New Atlantis marked a significant turning point in the history of utopian literature — not to mention the pre-history of science fiction, and even modern science itself. At the heart of the island paradise stumbled upon by Bacon's stranded sailors is a research institute called Bensalem where the locals practice "all sounds and their generation". The passage was sufficiently inspiring that Daphne Oram quoted it in full and pinned it to the wall of the newly opened BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957. Newly re-united with extracts from the Sylva Sylvarum, a notebook of real experiments that New Atlantis originally came bound with in the seventeenth century, this new publication seeks to bring Bacon's ideas to life for a new generation of artists and scholars engaged in the sonic arts, media archeology, and science studies. New Atlantis is presented with a brand new introduction by author and musician Robert Barry, which lays out the continuing relevance of Bacon's utopia for the place of sound and technology in the arts to this day.

The most comprehensive collection available of Bacon's philosophical and scientific writings, this volume offers Bacon's major works in their entirety, or in generous selections, revised from the classic 19th century editions of Spedding, Ellis and Heath. Selections from Bacon's natural histories round out this edition by showing the types of compilations that he believed would most contribute to the third part of his Great Instauration. In her General Introduction, Rose-Mary Sargent sketches Bacon's early life, education, and legal career, and discusses the major components of his philosophical works, and traces his influence on subsequent natural philosophy.

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.

A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign to the Restoration, this book is the first comprehensive attempt since J. C. Davis’ Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981) to understand the societies projected by utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the political idealism and millenarianism of the mid-seventeenth century. Where Davis concentrated on understanding utopias historically, Renaissance Utopia also seeks to make sense of utopia as a literary form, offering both a new typology of utopia and a new history of European humanist utopianism. This book examines how the utopia was transformed from an intellectual exercise in philosophical interrogation to a serious means of imagining practical social reform. In doing so it argues that the relationship between Renaissance utopia and Renaissance dialogue is crucial; the utopian mode of discourse continued to make use of aspects of dialogue even when the dialogue form itself was in decline. Exploring the ways in which utopian texts assimilated dialogue, Renaissance Utopia complements recent work by historians and literary scholars on early modern communities by providing a thorough investigation of the issues informing a way of modelling a very particular community and literary mode - the utopia.