Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mores of society. "Paper Bodies" was the wonderful phrase she used to described her manuscripts, which she hoped would continue to make "a great Blazing Light" after her death. There are connections here to Cavendish's most famous work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World...
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Acknowledgments\ List of Illustrations\ Introduction\ 1. Birth, Breeding, and Self-fashioning\ 2. Gender and Serious Play\ 3. Women and the New Sciences\ Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: A Brief Chronology\ Part I: Birth, Breeding, and Self-Fashioning\ 1. A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656)\ 2. Selections from CCXI Sociable Letters (1664)\ 3. Preface to Orations of Divers Sorts (1662)\ 4. Letter of Mary Evelyn to Mr. Ralph Bohun (c. 1667)\ Part II: Gender and Serious Play\ 1. The Convent of Pleasure (1668)\ 2. Preface to the Reader, The Worlds Olio (1655)\ 3. Female Orations, from Orations of Divers Sorts (1662)\ Part III: Women and the New Science\ 1. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666)\ 2. Selections from Poems and Fancies (1653)\ 3. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627)\ 4. Selections from Letters and Poems in Honour of... Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1676)\ 5. Aphra Behn, Preface to her translation of Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1688)\ Works Cited and Select Bibliography
