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marshalling of gender in the New Atlantis and to argue that an understanding of Bacon’s use and manipulation of the utopian genre helps re-articulate the gendering of his epistemology. As a consequence of our theoretical approach, there are some key questions to ask about gender and sexual difference in the New Atlantis. To what extent are gender and sexual difference presented in normative terms within the text and how do they relate to contemporary writings about, and contests over, gender? Do they, for example, contest Jacobean political norms? Does utopian discourse
by way of fiction, onto the territory of geographers. The geographer David Harvey attempts the inverse of this in Spaces of Hope (2000). Exemplifying the emerging correspondences between theories of the metropolis and metropolitan fiction, Harvey’s analysis is embellished with an appendix which (unwittingly?) uncovers some of the contradictions between utopian discourse and utopian practice (Harvey, 2000: 257–81). Harvey describes a possible vision of future social relations constructed from the ashes of our present society (the concrete realities of material
impacts on life itself, in the extent to which it pre supposes the equality of human beings. 29 Hardt and Negri cite Genet as an exemplary proponent of deterritorialised politics in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 109. 30 This of course conflicts with Derrida’s spectral notion of messianism developed in works such as Spectres of Marx : The State of the Debt , the Work of Mourning and the New International , trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). 31 There is much in common here with Fredric Jameson’s notion of utopian
its inhabitants’. 33 Another divergence is that where historians remonstrate about the need to inoculate counterfactual inquiry against ‘imaginative literature’ and its (unserious) blandishments, 34 theorists have proposed to ‘historicize utopian thinking’ in a manner precisely opposite. 35 Caitríona Ní Dhúill proposes to relocate the phenomenon of utopian discourse—a historical event in its own right—explicitly ‘within [past] literary and imaginative practice’. 36 Noting that ‘criticism has only just begun to explore’ literary counterfactualism, organizers of