(Un)dreaming the Celestial New World in The Blazing World and Gulliver’s Travels
0
조회
0
다운로드
2
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This study investigates how the lunar/celestial new world was dreamed and undreamed (via radical mechanization) respectively in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and the Voyage to Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the two major English successors to Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). The Man in the Moone popularized the post-Galileian lunar fiction across much of Europe, which indeed began as a dream with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream, 1634), but Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde (1657), written under Godwin’s direct influence, transformed the genre by foregrounding the core issues of seventeenth-century natural philosophy—matter and motion. In condemning René Descartes’ incorporeal substance, Cyrano dislodged fascination with the lunar new world from the earlier fictions. The Blazing World is a conscious response to Cyrano’s libertine fiction, in which Cavendish rejects not only Descartes but also mechanist materialists including Cyrano, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Hooke, instead asserting “self-moving Matter.” While defining motion as intrinsic to matter (body), Cavendish renews and rewrites the cosmic fantasy by restoring “Immaterial Spirits” and “rational Souls” wherewith to create many a “World of Nothing, but pure wit.” On the other hand, Swift’s Voyage to Laputa, also influenced by Cyrano, registers (by satirizing) the triumph of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic views on matter and motion. The Voyage to Laputa, a post-Newtonian variation upon the seventeenth-century lunar fiction, completes undreaming that genre by literally changing into an automaton not just the flying vehicle to the moon but the heavenly body itself.
Abstract
This study investigates how the lunar/celestial new world was dreamed and undreamed (via radical mechanization) respectively in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and the Voyage to Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the two major English successors to Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). The Man in the Moone popularized the post-Galileian lunar fiction across much of Europe, which indeed began as a dream with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream, 1634), but Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde (1657), written under Godwin’s direct influence, transformed the genre by foregrounding the core issues of seventeenth-century natural philosophy—matter and motion. In condemning René Descartes’ incorporeal substance, Cyrano dislodged fascination with the lunar new world from the earlier fictions. The Blazing World is a conscious response to Cyrano’s libertine fiction, in which Cavendish rejects not only Descartes but also mechanist materialists including Cyrano, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Hooke, instead asserting “self-moving Matter.” While defining motion as intrinsic to matter (body), Cavendish renews and rewrites the cosmic fantasy by restoring “Immaterial Spirits” and “rational Souls” wherewith to create many a “World of Nothing, but pure wit.” On the other hand, Swift’s Voyage to Laputa, also influenced by Cyrano, registers (by satirizing) the triumph of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic views on matter and motion. The Voyage to Laputa, a post-Newtonian variation upon the seventeenth-century lunar fiction, completes undreaming that genre by literally changing into an automaton not just the flying vehicle to the moon but the heavenly body itself.
참고문헌 (45)
- Aït-Touati, Frédérique, "Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century" (2011), U of Chicago P
- Battestin, Martin C, "The Critique of Freethinking from Swift to Sterne", Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 15(3-4), pp.339~420 (2003)
- Campbell, Mary Baine, "Literature", Park and Daston, ~
- Campbell, Mary Baine, "Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe" (1999), Cornell UP
- Cavendish, Margaret, "The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World" (2016), Broadview
- Cavendish, Margaret, "Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader" (2000), Broadview
- Clucas, Stephen, "A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle" (2003), Ashgate
- Cook, Harold J, "Medicine", Park and Daston, ~
- Cottegnies, Line, "Brilliant Heterodoxy: The Plurality of Worlds in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Estats et Empires de la Lune (1657)", Siegfried and Sarasohn, ~
- Cottingham, John, "The Cambridge Companion to Descartes" (1992), Cambridge UP
- Cottingham, John, "Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics, and Science", Cottingham, ~
- Cyrano de Bergerac, "Savinien de. Journey to the Moon" (2007), Hesperus
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de, "The Other World, or the Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon", London
- Descartes, René, "The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1" (1985), Cambridge UP
- Galilei, Galileo, "Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger" (1989), U of Chicago P
- Garber, Daniel, "Descartes’ Physics", Cottingham, ~
- Garber, Daniel, "Physics and Foundations", Park and Daston, ~
- Godwin, Francis, "The Man in the Moone" (2009), Broadview
- Guthke, Karl S, "Nightmare and Utopia: Extraterrestrial Worlds from Galileo to Goethe", Early Science and Medicine, 8(3), pp.173~195 (2003)
- Hatfield, Gary, "Descartes’ Physiology and Its Relation to His Psychology", Cottingham, ~
- Hobbes, Thomas, "Leviathan Or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill" (2010), Yale UP
- Kepler, Johannes, "Kepler’s Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy" (1967), U of Wisconsin P
- Kepler, Johannes, "Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger" (1965), Johnson
- Lambert, Ladina Bezzola, "Imagining the Unimaginable: The Poetics of Early Modern Astronomy" (2002), Rodopi
- 이시연, "The “Mechanical Operation” of Air and Madness in Swift’s Early Satire on Natural Philosophy", 18세기영문학, 12(2), pp.201~247 (2015), 한국18세기영문학회
- 이시연, "Newton and (Imp)aerial Science in Gulliver’s Travels", 18세기영문학, 13(2), pp.137~186 (2016), 한국18세기영문학회
- 이시연, "Somnium, The Man in the Moone, and Reading the Lunar New World in Post-Galileian Europe", 근대영미소설, 24(2), pp.85~116 (2017), 한국근대영미소설학회
- Leslie, Marina, "Mind the Map: Fancy, Matter, and World Construction in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World", Renaissance and Reformation, 35(1), pp.85~112 (2012)
- Lynall, Gregory, "Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730" (2012), Palgrave Macmillan
- Lucian, "A True History in Selected Dialogues" (2005), Oxford UP
- Marchitello, Howard, "The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo" (2011), Oxford UP
- Mascetti, Yaakov, "A ‘World of Nothing, but Pure Wit’: Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Imaginary", Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 6(1), pp.1~31 (2008)
- Nicolson, Marjorie, "Voyages to the Moon" (1948), Macmillan
- Park, Jennifer Mi-young, "Navigating Past, Potential, and Paradise: The Gendered Epistemologies of Discovery and Creation in Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World", Renaissance and Reformation, 35(1), pp.113~138 (2012)
- Park, Katharine, "The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science" (2006), Cambridge UP
- Randles, W. G. L, "The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500-1760: From Solid Heavens to Boundless Æther" (1999), Ashgate
- Roos, Anna Marie E, "Luminaries in the Natural World: The Sun and the Moon in England 1400-1720" (2001), Peter Lang
- Sarasohn, Lisa T, "The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution" (2010), Johns Hopkins UP
- Shapin, Steven, "Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life" (1985), Princeton UP
- Siegfried, Brandie R, "God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish" (2014), Ashgate
- Spiller, Elizabeth, "Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670" (2004), Cambridge UP
- Swift, Jonathan, "The Complete Poems" (1983), Penguin
- Swift, Jonathan, "A Full and True Account of the Battel of the Books in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works" (2010), Cambridge UP
- Swift, Jonathan, "Gulliver’s Travels" (2012), Cambridge UP
- Walters, Lisa, "Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics" (2014), Cambridge UP