The Extravagance of Form in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World

With its inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of female authorship, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) tends to be read as a gendered variation on, or a parodic departure from, the Baconian prototype of the early modern politico-scientific utopia. At the same time, the text’s dialogism, formal heterogeneity and self-reflexivity have spurred theoretical claims surrounding utopia as one of the formal precedents sedimented into the bedrock of novelistic fiction. This study takes up some of these arguments and ponders the possibility of exploring Cavendish’s work as an early instancing of the anarchetypal decentredness of novelistic form.