ABSTRACT
Margaret Cavendish's Blazing-World showcases the power and range of the imagination, but it also participates in real-world philosophical and political debates and expresses the author's unique metaphysics. Cavendish composed Blazing-World after spending the bulk of nearly 16 years in exile as a result of the English civil wars. In much of her work, Cavendish enjoys demolishing categorical stability; in Blazing-World, she takes this effort to new levels as she experiments with vertiginously shifting points of view, mercurial characters and settings, and fluctuating formal patterns. This chapter discusses Blazing-World's critical engagement with English experimental science of the 1660s. The Empress's conversations with the animal-men in Blazing-World serve as an obvious platform for Cavendish to disparage the Royal Society and to showcase the superiority of her own views. Because Cavendish treats genre as a means of reformatting and reassessing her ideas, some of her less-studied work will no doubt contribute to the future study of Blazing-World.
