Authorial conquests: essays on genre in the writings of Margaret Cavendish

Abstract

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 formiddable: she set out to build up a large body of work by systematic conquest of the major seveneenth-century genres, questioning their codes and conventions, while reflecting on her own practice. Many of her works strike readers as chaotic, but a consistent poetics does emerge once we acknowledge that humanistic ideals of order and symmetry are not her aim; they require a hybrid perspective, and it bears evidence to their complexity and modernity that they still challenge readers' responses and practices today. The eleven contributions to this volume are interdisciplinary and multinational and represent a variety of modern critical approaches to the problems of placing Cavendish's generic explorations in the context of contemporary literary and philosophical history.

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