Margaret Cavendish

This collection provides the most comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of the works of Margaret Cavendish currently available.

Margaret Cavendish was a remarkable polymath, and this collection brings together academics from a fittingly wide range of academic disciplines to examine each of her major works. A truly comprehensive resource for scholars and graduate students of both arts and sciences, this study reflects the astonishing breadth of Cavendish's work.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.