This World of My Devising: The Author as Authority and Other in Cavendish’s The Blazing World
Cavendish’s The Blazing World is a vehement defence of fiction. In a preface “To the Reader”, she writes, “But Fictions are an issue of mans Fancy… without regard, whether the thing, he fancies, be really existent without his mind or not” (59).
Double Standards: Analyzing the Gender Inequality Lurking in Rousseau’s Discourse
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality is an influential work of the early romantic period which has impacted many philosophers throughout the centuries. His views as a privileged and wealthy white man allow him to speak of returning to “the good old days” where men lived for themselves, with the freedom to go and do as they pleased, unshackled by the rules and expectations of modern society.