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Chapter 3 - Figuring

Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Imagining and Worlding

from Part II - Postsecular Literary Experiences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

Corrinne Harol
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

“Figuring: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Imagining and Worlding,” undertakes a case study of Cavendish’s foray into a favored intellectual strategy of modernity: to imagine a world (and therefore a politics) that follows the laws of the natural world as discovered by science. The worldview of liberalism is grounded in ideas of diversity and tolerance, the possibility of an ever-expanding, cosmopolitan world.i This is the proto-liberal view that Cavendish’s proto-conservatism, vitalism, and theory of the literary imagination finds untenable. Cavendish’s conservatism is manifested explicitly in the representations of sovereign violence that seem necessary to protect worlds and implicitly in the significance of a method of “figuration” that Cavendish theorizes—and practices—as the foundation of form in the natural world, the social world, and the literary imagination. Such figuration cannot escape the violent reality of secular nationalism inherent in the notion of “worlds.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Figuring
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.006
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  • Figuring
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.006
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Figuring
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.006
Available formats
×