Marie Hause, Victoria Reynolds Farmer, and Leah Henning discuss Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, a groundbreaking piece of speculative fiction by a unique seventeenth-century female writer and philosopher.
KNOWING
- Background on Cavendish: her life, her works, The Blazing World (1666) and its context
- Our reactions to Cavendish and The Blazing World
READING
- Plot outline of The Blazing World
- The Blazing World and gender
- A woman in power
- Seventeenth-century context
- The Blazing World and religion
- Women in the church
- Rhetoric of Heaven and Hell
PASSING ON
- Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First (2016)
- Marina Leslie, “Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Utopian Studies 7.1 (1996): 6-24; and Thomas More’s Utopia (Norton Critical Edition).
- Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
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