ABSTRACT
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, has long been known for her social and authorial transgressions. The sustained critical attention to her life and works over the past two decades has accentuated her inventive, enigmatic, and often self-consciously transgressive literary practices, which were stimulated, in part, by the violent and volatile age in which she lived and wrote. Cavendish suggests that it is almost impossible to expel the anxiety and dread of a war-weary society and these passions do not merely influence the minds of particular characters in The Blazing World, but increasingly seep into the text as a whole. Ironically, the fear and anxiety that emerge from the aftermath of war leads to more conflict as it defensively penetrates the seemingly innocent discourse of science and relocates it in the decidedly masculine realm of warfare.
