Literature and Politics

The study of early modern rhetorical practice as it intersects with issues of cognitive process is a growing field of interest among rhetorical scholars. As a field well recognized but not thoroughly studied, it provides a wide range of potential insights into the dynamics and politics of persuasion. This paper examines in particular the rhetorical strategy of evoking a mental image and its usefulness for logical persuasion. Such an analysis and the contemporary rhetorical theorists who inform it, has a crucial relevance for how we understand their use of political and religious ideas to construct ‘better’ worlds in utopian texts in particular.

One of the most important utopian texts of the early seventeenth century is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, given its well known influence on the scientific developments of the century. Written near the end of his political career while disillusioned after his fall from office, this highly rhetorical text is particularly useful for investigating the political and utopian functions to which Bacon put his own influential theory of rhetoric. That theory connects the ‘rationality’ of rhetoric with its ability to manipulate the imagination to support ‘reason’, and opens out in a number of interesting ethical directions. This paper focuses on Bacon’s evocations of mental images in New Atlantis as rhetorical strategies for introducing ideas about the moral benefits of technology. It argues that a consideration of the strategic value of such evocations is a useful way of understanding Bacon’s important contribution to the history of rhetorical and political theory.