Melissa Bailes, Review of Anne M. Thell’s “‘[A]s lightly as two thoughts’: Motion, Materialism, and Cavendish’s Blazing World

摘要

Anne Thell's essay explores the ways in which Margaret Cavendish's imaginative text, Blazing World (1666), dramatizes and challenges the theories of organic materialism in her scientific treatise, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). Thell categorizes Blazing World within the genre of travel writing, and this proves key to understanding its interrelations of motion, mind, and matter. In Cavendish's fictional work, travel becomes representative of rational and imaginative thought. While in Observations Cavendish considers everything, including the soul and mind, to be both material and in perpetual motion, Thell argues that Blazing World additionally supplies the possibility to fantasize about moving beyond materiality