Common Contracts

Distribution Agreement

Distribution Agreement • October 12th, 2012

• Contract Type
  Distribution Agreement
• Filed
  October 12th, 2012

This study sets out to explore how early modern author Margaret Cavendish used her writings to offer a bold feminist statement that reconfigured seventeenth-­‐century notions of gender. I base my argument on three primary texts: Bell in Campo (1662), The Convent of Pleasure (1668), and The Description of a New World called the Blazing New World (1666). I argue that Cavendish uses “gender blending” to fashion a feminist statement that deconstructs her era’s gender binary and its associated gendered hierarchy. Through this deconstruction, she uses her works as gender transgressive spaces that enable women to enter the public sphere.