About the Editors:
Line Cottegnies teaches English literature at the University of Paris 8--Saint-Denis. She is the author of L'Éclipse du regard: la poésie anglaise du baroqu au classicisme (1625-1660) and has published articles on various aspects of seventeenth-century literature, including on Margaret Cavendish. She has also published a French translation of her Blazing World (Le Monde glorieux) and is currently working on epicureanism in the literature of the period.

This collection of essays by leading scholars offers the first substantial study of Margaret Cavendish's innovative use of genre and tries to render justice to her extraordinary authorial ambition. The thoroughness of Cavendish's literary project was formidable: she built up a large body of work by systematic "conquest" of the major seventeenth-century genres, questioning their codes and conventions, while reflecting on her own practice. The eleven contributions to this volume are interdisciplinary and multinational and thus present a variety of critical approaches to the problem of placing Cavendish's generic explorations in the context of contemporary literary and philosophical history.