“The Waking Vision“: Reference in the New Atlantis

Abstract

Bacon's Only Piece of fictional writing, in addition to the masques he wrote for a Christmas entertainment at Gray'sjnn in 1594, was published posthumously by Rawley. Most commentators assume that he wrote New Atlantis at the time he hoped to become provost of Eton in 1623. Bacon's death in 1626 meant that, apart from the last edition of the Essays in 1625, this was his last major work written in English. Many critics have discussed Bacon's stylistic methods, and several have speculated that his view and practice of linguistic representation in the 1620s had become rigorously non-metaphoric for the purpose of imparting scientific knowledge.