Science and Satire: the Lucianic Voice of Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World

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.