A Princely Brave Woman : Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

This title was first published in 2003. This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and controversial women writers of the seventeenth century. Reflecting the full range of Cavendish's output - which included poetry, drama, prose fictions, orations, and natural philosophy - these essays re-assess Cavendish's place in seventeenth- century literature and philosophy. Whilst approaching Cavendish's work from a range of critical (and disciplinary) perspectives, the authors of these essays are united in their commitment to recovering her writings from their frequent characterisation as "eccentric" or "idiosyncratic", and aim to present her work as historically legible within the cultural contexts in which they were written. The "Mad Madge" of literary legend and tradition is re-written as a bold, innovative and experimental creator of a female authorial voice, and as a thinker vitally in contact with the intellectual currents of her age. Cover Half Title Dedication Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Abbreviations 1 Introduction Part I: Prose Fictions 2 Contracting Readers: 'Margaret Newcastle' and the Rhetoric of Conjugality 3 'How Great is Thy Change': Familial Discourses in the Cavendish Family 4 'Of Mixt Natures': Questions of Genre in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World 5 Autobiography, Parody and the Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish Part II: Drama 6 Writing for the Brain and Writing for the Boards: the Producibility of Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Texts 7 'Making a Spectacle': Margaret Cavendish and the Staging of the Self 8 'The Closet Opened': A Reconstruction of 'Private' Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish Part III: Poetry 9 Imagining the Mind: Cavendish's Hobbesian Allegories 10 Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies and Thomas Harriot's Treatise on Infinity 11 A Well-Spun Yarn: Margaret Cavendish and Homer's Penelope Part IV: Natural Philosophy 12 Margaret Cavendish and Henry More 13 Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric 14 Margaret Cavendish, the Doctors of Physick and Advice to the Sick 15 Paradigms and Politics: Hobbes and Cavendish Contrasted Bibliography Index