Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

This essay locates a trend in early English literature to imagine fantastical feats of territorial engineering, including the tale of island-making in More's Utopia and a dream for continent-bridging in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. It considers how these geographical representations negotiate a desire for nationalist agency in an increasingly global marketplace, while also exploring the built-in limitations of empire itself—especially empire's inability to resolve its own contradictory desire for contact and containment. The essay explores the recurring symbolic representation of islands and bridges in the utopian social imagination of the period as a figuration for emergent global capital. At the center of the essay, then, is a study of Bacon's New Atlantis, the story of an imaginary, insulated island that simultaneously occupies a privileged position of oversight in the world. By allowing Bensalem to benefit from global relations without actually participating in them, Bacon's utopia represents early modern English anxieties about England's place in the world system. In its contradictory fantasy of total isolation and global all-knowing, Bensalem is presented here as a symbolic figure for both the bridged globe and the island nation, thus standing in for a capitalist system that relies on nation-based exploitation and uneven geographical development.