ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Francis Bacon's utopian prose text, The New Atlantis, published posthumously in 1627 with the goal of picking up where Macbeth leaves off. Because it is a utopian narrative, The New Atlantis foregrounds questions of abundance and deprivation, speaking with poignant urgency to the relationship between humans and their natural environs. Bacon anticipated by several centuries the importance of "paradigms", which conceptual tools are at the heart of Thomas S. Kuhn's account of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. Recalcitrant winds have stalled the journey, leaving the group stranded "in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, without victuals". The direness of this situation prompts the narrator to describe members of his group as "desolate strangers", helplessly adrift and in need of assistance. The New Atlantis devotes attention to the basic social unit—the family—on Bensalem.
