Cavendish and the Aesthetics of Beating Spacetime

The Humanities Research Centre in partnership with the Gender Institute present the 2024 HRC-GI Distinguished Lecture

Cavendish and the Aesthetics of Beating Spacetime
Presented by Anne M. Thell (National University of Singapore)

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) is newly relevant in all kinds of ways, as even a cursory glance at recent scholarship in philosophy or literature will indicate. However, with few exceptions, we have not yet acknowledged Cavendish as an aesthetic thinker. Here, I address that oversight by showing how her later philosophy and her fiction, Blazing World (1666), advocate a radical materialism that nearly outpaces the limits of the body and demands a concomitant bio-poetics that can adequately register organic matter’s cogent, ongoing transformations. Despite her materialist commitments, the author advances early aesthetic thinking precisely when she leans away from the spatiotemporal properties of thinking bodies and resists the creaturely dissolution that time brings. Indeed, in Blazing World and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), Cavendish offers the final iteration of her career-long interest in a material consciousness that strives to slip free of the body and time.

Anne M. Thell Associate Professor of English, National University of Singapore
HRC-Gender Institute Visiting Fellow for 2024
Anne M. Thell is an American scholar and literary critic. Her work ranges across the humanities, with special focus on eighteenth-century literature, science and literature, travel literature, early English fiction, the history of philosophy, and early women writers. She completed a BA at the University of California at Berkeley, and MA and PhD at Fordham University, where she also served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in AY2011-12. In 2012, Thell became Assistant Professor of English literature at National University of Singapore, where she has been based for the past decade and is now an Associate Professor of English. Thell has published widely including a monograph, Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century Voyage Literature (Bucknell 2017), and the first critical edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Grounds of Natural Philosophy (Broadview 2020). Other work has appeared in such journals as The Review of English Studies (OUP), Configurations (JHU Press), Studies in Travel Writing (Taylor & Francis), Eighteenth-Century Life (JHU Press), and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Toronto), and she has essays in several collections, including the new edition of The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (CUP 2022) and Science and Storytelling in the Eighteenth Century (Virginia 2023). Anne M. Thell has presented work all over the world and has co-launched and presided over a series of international networks, including The Coalition of English Departments in Asia (COEDA) and The Southeast Asia Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (SASECS). She is Vice President of The International Margaret Cavendish Society.