This chapter examines Francis Bacon’s fictional ‘new world’ discovery narrative, The New Atlantis (1626), and its influence on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). It begins by showing how Bacon’s dream of a visually rooted imperial empiricism gives shape to Hooke’s observations, both physical and textual, of the ‘new world’ revealed to him by the technology of the microscope. It then turns to Cavendish’s utopian fiction as another new world narrative in this tradition and argues that in this work Cavendish directly responds to the visually charged imperialistic empiricism of The New Atlantis and Micrographia. Where Bacon and Hooke posit optically enhanced vision as a means through which particular humans could both discover and ‘improve’ nature to meet their own ends, The Blazing World, in keeping with Cavendish’s own vitalist philosophy, celebrates the knowledge of non-human animals and holds out intersubjectivity in place of objectivity as the most fruitful means of engaging both human and non-human nature.
