Authorial Conquests

by Cottegnies, Line; Weitz, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780838639832
• ISBN10: 0838639836
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-01
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr

Summary

This collection of essays by leading scholars offers the first substantial study of Margaret Cavendish's innovative use of genre and tries to render justice to her extraordinary authorial ambition. The thoroughness of Cavendish's literary project was formidable: she built up a large body of work by systematic "conquest" of the major seventeenth-century genres, questioning their codes and conventions, while reflecting on her own practice. The eleven contributions to this volume are interdisciplinary and multinational and thus present a variety of critical approaches to the problem of placing Cavendish's generic explorations in the context of contemporary literary and philosophical history.

Table of Contents

Introduction	7	(16)
LINE COTTEGNIES and NANCY WEITZ
Part I: Non-Fictional Writings
Triply Bound: Genre and the Exilic Self	23	(17)
EMMA L. E. REES
Leviathan and the Lady: Cavendish's Critique of Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters	40	(19)
LISA T. SARASOHN
Anecdotal and Cabalistic Forms in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy	59	(21)
BRANDIE R. SIEGFRIED
Margaret Cavendish's Life o f William, Plutarch, and Mixed Genre	80	(23)
JAMES FITZMAURICE
The "Native Tongue" of the "Authoress": The Mythical Structure of Margaret Cavendish's Autobiographical Narrative	103	(20)
LINE COTTEGNIES
Part II: Imaginative Writings
"Flattering Division": Margaret Cavendish's Poetics of Variety	123	(22)
HERO CHALMERS
Romantic Fiction, Moral Anxiety, and Social Capital in Cavendish's "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity"	145	(16)
NANCY WEITZ
Science and Satire: The Lucianic Voice of Margaret Cavendish's Description o f a New World Called the Blazing World	161	(18)
SARAH HUTTON
Fantastic Realism: Margaret Cavendish and the Possibilities of Drama	179	(16)
ALEXANDRA G. BENNETT
Playing Games with Gender and Genre: The Dramatic Self Fashioning of Margaret Cavendish	195	(18)
SARA MENDELSON
Margaret Cavendish's Drama: An Aesthetic of Fragmentation	213	(16)
GISÈLE VENET
Notes on Contributors	229	(4)
Index	233