Afbeelding van de auteur.

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673)

Auteur van The Blazing World and Other Writings

36+ Werken 1,013 Leden 17 Besprekingen Favoriet van 4 leden

Over de Auteur

Ontwarringsbericht:

(eng) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Fotografie: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)

Werken van Margaret Cavendish

The Blazing World (1666) 177 exemplaren
100 Eternal Masterpieces of Literature - volume 2 (2020) — Medewerker — 71 exemplaren
Sociable Letters (2004) 11 exemplaren
Convent of Pleasure: A Comedy (1995) 10 exemplaren
Margaret Cavendish (NYRB Poets) (2018) 9 exemplaren
Essential writings (2019) 6 exemplaren
Grounds of natural philosophy (2020) 3 exemplaren
Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (2004) 3 exemplaren
The Female Academy (2017) 1 exemplaar
The worlds olio 1 exemplaar
Poems and Fancies (1972) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

The Penguin Book of Women Poets (1978) — Medewerker — 298 exemplaren
The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509-1659 (1992) — Medewerker — 285 exemplaren
The Utopia Reader (1999) — Medewerker — 111 exemplaren
Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women's Verse (1988) — Medewerker — 103 exemplaren
The Grand Quarrel: Women's Memoirs of the English Civil War (1993) — Medewerker — 66 exemplaren
Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (2014) — Medewerker — 42 exemplaren
Masters of British Literature, Volume A (2007) — Medewerker — 20 exemplaren
Women on Nature (2021) — Medewerker — 20 exemplaren
Women Poets of the English Civil War (2018) — Medewerker — 11 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Cavendish, Margaret
Officiële naam
Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten
Marchioness of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Lucas, Margaret
Geboortedatum
1623
Overlijdensdatum
1673-12-15
Graflocatie
Westminster Abbey, London, England, UK
Geslacht
female
Nationaliteit
UK
Land (voor op de kaart)
England, UK
Geboorteplaats
Colchester, Essex, England
Plaats van overlijden
London, England, UK
Woonplaatsen
Colchester, Essex, England
Paris, France
Antwerp, Belgium
Opleiding
tutors
Beroepen
poet
philosopher
essayist
playwright
autobiographer
maid of honor (toon alle 7)
biographer
Relaties
Egerton, Elizabeth Cavendish (stepdaughter)
Cavendish, William (husband)
Korte biografie
Margaret Cavendish, née Lucas, was born in Colchester, Essex, one of eight children of a minor landowner. The family's lives were upended in 1642 by violence at the start of the English Civil War. Margaret went to the court of King Charles I at Oxford as a maid-of-honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. When the Queen fled to France, Margaret went with her. There in 1645, she met and married the courtier and author William Cavendish, future 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The couple moved to Antwerp, where she began to write. Between 1654 and 1668, she published more than 14 books; they appeared under her own name at a time when most female writers could only publish anonymously. In addition to fiction and works of natural philosophy (science), she wrote one of the first biographies by a woman written in English. The duchess was widely derided with cruel nicknames, including Mad Madge.
Ontwarringsbericht
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Leden

Besprekingen

Ficção filosófica de 1666, O Mundo Resplandencente, também entendido como um dos primeiros textos de ficção-científica, é uma jornada a um mundo fantástico, afim de discutir filosofia metafísica, natural (física etc), teologia e política. A moça, raptada, acaba sendo a única sobrevivente de uma tempestade e por um portal chega a um outro mundo, onde acaba ocupando o cargo de imperatriz absoluta. Seguem conferências dela com os humanos dos mais variados tipos, ursos, pássaros, minhocas, espíritos, sobre o privilégio da matéria, preconceitos imaterialistas e teológicos, construção de mundos etc. Leve e divertido, este livrinho também tem o diferencial de ser completamente centrado em figuras femininas (a imperatriz, depois seu amor platônico, a duquesa que se confunde com a autora).… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
henrique_iwao | 9 andere besprekingen | Aug 30, 2022 |
This peculiar story was written in the mid-seventeenth century by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. It features an unnamed female protagonist who is abducted and then escapes and is transported from her own "Philosophical World" to the "Blazing World" of the title, where she is hospitably received and becomes Empress.

The Blazing World is populated something like the planet Mongo, with bear-men, fox-men, fish-men, bird-men, spider-men, lice-men, and others besides. The Empress consults all of these according to their specialties, regarding natural history, physics, logic, and other "philosophical" topics, and this section of the book gets rather slow--especially with the small type of the Dover Thrift Edition I read. One highlight of this section, on the other hand, is Cavendish's detailed set of character identifications for Ben Jonson's The Alchemist as a drame à clef regarding John Dee and Edward Kelly (35). This passage is connected with the Empress' further ambition "to make a Cabbala" (46).

Turning from her various animal-men subjects to the world of incorporeal spirits, the Empress is next introduced to ... the Duchess of Newcastle--that is, her author, with whom she develops a "platonic love." The Duchess pleads for intervention with Fortune on behalf of her maligned husband the Duke, and this motive accounts for much of the remainder of the first and longer of the story's two parts.

The second part is livelier on the whole, and involves the Empress receiving news that her home country in the Philosophical World is under threat. So she confers with the Duchess, and they develop and execute an operation by which they effect the military and political supremacy of the "King of EFSI," the Empress' former sovereign.

An epilogue in Cavendish's own voice touts her accomplishment in world-creation, and boasts herself superior in that respect to the mere conquerors of great empires such as Alexander and Caesar. She also sets herself above Homer, in giving her characters grounds to resolve their conflicts without fatal violence. She generously extends to her readers the option of becoming her subjects in the Philosophical World, but allows that if they prefer to create their own worlds, they can and should do so.

While the style of The Blazing World is dated, its freedom from later literary conventions often lends it a great deal of charm. Persevering through some of the denser bits is genuinely worthwhile, as the whole text is not that long. It was originally published as a "work of fancy" bound together with her "serious" Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (ix). Her philosophical biases are decidedly modern, and while The Blazing World has been instanced as a forerunner of science fiction, it does hold up as an unusual source of instruction in the magick of cosmopoeia.
… (meer)
3 stem
Gemarkeerd
paradoxosalpha | 9 andere besprekingen | May 30, 2022 |
This story, whose full title is “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World”, is a curiosity. It was published in 1666 and written by the Duchess of Newcastle and can be considered a forerunner of science fiction because it’s set on a strange new world. However, this is a tough slog. The story is told in seemingly never-ending sentences and has consisted entirely of a woman who somehow escapes our world to land on a new one populated by all sorts of strange creatures, and they bandy about the latest scientific ideas. I’m dropping this unfinished because there isn’t much narrative drive to the story.… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
rabbitprincess | 9 andere besprekingen | May 21, 2022 |
The Contract
This was ok, couple of points of interest, a pretty good bit of servant/master comedy and some meditations on why discretion is the better part of valour. [2/5]

Assaulted and Pursued Chastity
Again like the last tale really terrible love interest characters and that makes the female characters that love them look pretty bad too. However this tale is so random with some weird fantasy/lost world elements thrown in and wars and all sorts of stuff happening.
Its interesting how Cavendish makes her writings purely fictional, including separating them from the real world by replacing names and even religion. So the places are called things like Kingdom of Riches, Kingdom of Amour etc. and no one even when promoting christian-like beliefs ever refers to a God, but rather invokes Jupiter/Juno etc. [2.5/5]

The Blazing World
My second reading of this part, heres my initial review:
A weird bit of philosophy and proto-sci-fi. Ignores the rules of any conventional story, features parallel worlds, astral-projection, submarines made of gold and many sorts of animal men including Lice-men. Best approached as a piece of philosophy rather than sci-fi but quite interesting.

Most things still apply but was a lot drier than i remembered, but also more interesting in certain parts. An invasion that happens near the end which uses the things in spoilers above, those things were actually Plan B, Plan A was a zombie army, crazy stuff.
Certain of the allegorical elements reminded me of parts of the [b:The Faerie Queene|765427|The Faerie Queene|Edmund Spenser|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328308492l/765427._SY75_.jpg|19904], and [b:Lucian's True History|38592647|Lucian's True History|Lucian of Samosata|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518723013l/38592647._SY75_.jpg|3593172] gets referenced too which is quite appropriate. [3/5]

Overall you have to remember this was written in 1666, the times of shakespeare, spencer, cervantes etc. If this was composed during the 1860s it might be less weird... scratch that... it would be just as weird but a bit less interesting.
However for the 1600's these writings are truly unique oddities with their mix of metaphor, fantasy, science and philosophy.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
wreade1872 | 4 andere besprekingen | Nov 28, 2021 |

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Statistieken

Werken
36
Ook door
14
Leden
1,013
Populariteit
#25,448
Waardering
½ 3.5
Besprekingen
17
ISBNs
117
Talen
6
Favoriet
4

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