In the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish authored a work of utopian fiction that has been called one of the earliest examples of science fiction. Doctoral student Stacy Wykle thinks otherwise—and her research supports the book’s contributions to scientific discourse as well as Cavendish’s vision to reorganize the social, intellectual, and chronological realities of her day.
Wykle will present “Materiality, Creativity, and the Early Modern Scientific Epistemology of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing-World” at the 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA), to be held November 3-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. SLSA brings together individuals from a variety of backgrounds who share a common interest in the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine.
Wykle’s talk will focus on the influence of Cavendish—a philosopher, poet, scientist, writer, and playwright—in popularizing the ideas of the scientific revolution during a time when the contributions of women were minimized.
Abstract: Margaret Cavendish published her Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666, 1668) both as an appendix to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and as a separate text, or paratext, meant for a female audience. In the centuries that followed, The Blazing-World was largely forgotten. Owing to the advent of book history, the concern with materiality, and the rise of feminist criticism in the 1990s, interest in the work was revitalized, but primarily as a work of science fiction rather than as ancillary to her scientific argument. Scholars, therefore, to date, tend to overlook the extent to which The Blazing-World functions as an epistemic critique of Robert Hooke's microscope as a new way of seeing nature, and that Cavendish employed both the literary and publication conventions of her time to offer an alternative epistemological tool, much in the way Donna Haraway has used the cyborg metaphor to grapple with contemporary, positivist science. Her use of the folio format to promulgate her opinions by submitting them to Oxford and Cambridge in hopes that readers of the future would take her as seriously as men like Hooke makes a consideration of her work relevant to the field of information science/studies. The work’s initial, dual, material embodiments and, of course, the early modern social fact of her gender seem to have obscured the science in the utopian fiction of which The Blazing-World is said to be an early example. The work is but one document in Cavendish’s overall project to publicly participate in early modern scientific discourse. It communicates not only with her other published writings, but with the published writings of her contemporaries.
Wykle is a third-year doctoral student whose research interests include popular reception of and access to scientific research; early modern transmission of information and development of scholarly networks; evolution of scholarly journal format and editorial peer review; materiality of scientific communication; application of socio-technical theories to history of publication in the sciences from early modern Europe to present day; preprint publication and the economics of scientific publication houses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and STS perspectives in information science discipline and pedagogy.