Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Description

Margaret Cavendish's prolific and wide-ranging contributions to seventeenth-century intellectual culture are impossible to contain within the discrete confines of modern academic disciplines. Paying attention to the innovative uses of genre through which she enhanced and complicated her writings both within literature and beyond, this collection addresses her oeuvre and offers the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary resource on Cavendish's works to date. The astonishing breadth of her varied intellectual achievements is reflected through elegantly arranged sections on History of Science, Philosophy, Literature, Politics and Reception, and New Directions, together with an Afterword by award-winning novelist Siri Hustvedt. The first book to cover nearly all of Cavendish's major works in a single volume, this collection brings together a variety of expert perspectives to illuminate the remarkable ideas and achievements of one of the most fascinating and prolific figures of the early modern period.

Lisa Walters is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She is author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge 2014). She coedits the Restoration section of the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women Writers and has published articles on Cavendish, Shakespeare and Milton. Brandie R. Siegfried was the Nan Grass Professor at Brigham Young University. She won the Josephine Roberts Award for the Best Scholarly Edition of 2018, awarded by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, for her edition of Cavendish's Poems and Fancies. She also coedited two volumes, including World-making Renaissance Women (Cambridge 2021).

"Walters's book is most helpful in examining Cavendish's complex thinking in a new way ... Recommended. Graduate students, researchers faculty." M. Cole, Choice