Politics, Authorship, and Philosophy: Teaching Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World in the Diverse Graduate Classroom

Authors

Martine Van Elk, California State University, Long BeachFollow

Author Biography

Martine van Elk is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. She has published extensively on early modern women, Shakespeare, and vagrancy. Her work has appeared in edited collections and journals. Her book, Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere was published by Palgrave in 2017. She is a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English and working on a comparative study of women on and behind the stage in England, the Dutch Republic, and France. She also runs a blog on early modern female book ownership.

Abstract

This essay explores how Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World works differently when taught and read on its own and in combination with Cavendish’s other works. Focusing specifically on the graduate classroom, I examine and present strategies for teaching the book alongside works by other early modern women and for teaching it in a single-author course. While in isolation, The Blazing World allows for discussions that focus primarily on questions of gender, genre, class, and politics, read in tandem with Cavendish’s other works, in particular her philosophical writings, The Blazing World becomes a source for reflections on questions of creaturely identity, nature, and interdisciplinarity.

Keywords

Literature, Margaret Cavendish, Novel, Philosophy, Teaching

Recommended Citation

Van Elk, Martine (2024) "Politics, Authorship, and Philosophy: Teaching Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World in the Diverse Graduate Classroom," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.14: Iss.1, Article 8.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.14.1.1346
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol14/iss1/8