Abstract
The year 1666 saw the publication of The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World, a novel written as a companion piece to a philosophical treatise entitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.1 As with all of her work, Margaret Cavendish financed the publication herself, and opted for a lavish series of in-folios. At the time, the release of these texts was thought a considerable impropriety: Cavendish was not only disregarding seventeenth-century norms which discouraged women’s writing, but also transgressing the accepted boundaries of publications by women (translations and devotional works) by publishing philosophical treatises, scientific and lyrical poetry, essays and novels. A fictional response by natural philosophy to the Royal Society’s reforming enterprise, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World dramatizes the failure and destruction of experimental philosophy. Fiction serves to dramatize the return to the old order. What the fiction achieves through the narration is a regressive temporal evolution capable of abolishing change.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Aït-Touati, Frédérique. 2014. “The spirit of invention,” Hooke’s poetics for a new science in an attempt to prove the motion of the earth by observation. In Rhetoric and the early Royal Society. A sourcebook, ed. Tina Skouen, and Ryan Stark, 185–201. Boston/Leyden: Brill.
Albanese, Denise. 1996. New science, new world. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bacon, Francis. 1984. The advancement of learning, 6th edn, ed. G.W. Kitchin. London: Everyman’s Library.
Barthes, Roland. 1970. ‘L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-Memoire’. In L’Aventure sémiologique I, 85–166. Paris: Le Seuil.
Beugnot, B. 1994. Des Muses ouvrières: considérations sur les instruments de l’invention. Les lieux de mémoire et la fabrique de l’œuvre, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Biblio 17(80): 27–38.
Biagioli, Mario. 1993. Galileo, courtier: The practice of science in the culture of absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Campbell, Mary B. 1999. Wonder and science: Imagining worlds in early modern Europe. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Cavendish, Margaret. 1653. A world in an eare-ring. In Poems and fancies. London.
———. 1991. The blazing world. In An anthology of seventeenth-century fiction, ed. Paul Salzman. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1994. The blazing world and other writings, ed. Kate Lilley. London: Pickering, [1992] rept. Penguin.
———. 1999. Le Monde glorieux, éd. et tr. and preface by Line Cottegnies. Paris: Corti.
Cicero. 1888. De Inventione, II. Trans. C.D. Yonge. London: George Bell and Sons.
Clucas, Stephen. 1994. The atomism of the Cavendish circle: A reappraisal. Seventeenth Century 9–10: 247–273.
——— (ed). 2003. A princely brave woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish. Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
Cocking, John M. 1984. Bacon’s view of imagination. In F. Bacon: Terminologia e Fortuna Nel XVII secolo, 43–58. Roma: Edizioni delle’Ateneo.
———. 1991. Imagination. A study in the history of ideas. London/New York: Routledge.
Cottegnies, Line. 2002. Margaret Cavendish and Cyrano de Bergerac: A Libertine Subtext for Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 54: 165–86.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. 1998. Wonders and the order of nature 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books.
Du Bellay, Joachim. 1948. La Deffence et illustration de la langue Françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard. Paris: M. Didier.
Graziani, F. 1994. La poétique de la fable: entre inventio et disposition. XVIIe siècle 182: 83–103.
Hutton, Sarah. 1997. Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and seventeenth-century scientific thought. In Women, science and medicine 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter, and Sarah Hutton, 218–234. Stroud: Sutton Publication.
Lilley, Kate. 1992. Introduction. The blazing world and other writings, ed. Kate Lilley. London: Pickering.
Mortier, Roland. 1982. L’originalité. Une nouvelle catégorie esthétique au siècle des Lumières. Genève: Droz.
Noille-Clauzade, Christine. 2006. Les mondes de la fiction au XVIIe siècle: de nouveaux styles de fictionnalité. Fabula. http://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Les_mondes_de_la_fiction_au_XVIIe
O’Neill, Eileen. 2001. Observations upon experimental philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pérez-Ramos, Antonio. 1988. Francis Bacon’s idea of science and the maker’s knowledge tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varga, A. Kibédi. 1976. L’invention de la fable, Forme et contenu selon la poétique du classicisme. Poétique 7: 109–123.
Whitaker, Katie. 2002. Mad Madge: The extraordinary life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the first woman to live by her pen. New York: Basic Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aït-Touati, F. (2017). Making Worlds: Invention and Fiction in Bacon and Cavendish. In: Marchitello, H., Tribble, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science . Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46361-6_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46361-6_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-46778-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46361-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)