“A Work of Fancy”: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

The term “fancy,” one synonym for imagination, figures centrally in Cavendish’s defense of her fanciful writing and ambitious world-making in Blazing World. Her complex use of the term “fancy” at once looks back to “phantasy” as a premodern term of faculty psychology, and forward to “fantasy” as an emerging genre of fanciful speculative fiction. However, the word “fancy” itself does not capture how Cavendish reimagines “imagination.” Cavendish pairs the term “fancy” with “reason,” showing how they are intertwined in her fiction, but I argue that memory is central to how Cavendish depicts her fiction-making in Blazing World, as a process of embodied cognition which she represents through metafiction. Specifically, this chapter explores the conjunction of natural and artificial memory, colloquially the “art of memory.” This ancient method of mnemonics, which entails the mental construction of places filled with vivid images, depends upon the creative cognitive processes of image-making and imagination. More importantly, I suggest, the art of memory is a poetics, an art of storytelling: Cavendish constructs Blazing World as a memorial and a memory theater, which she dramatizes as the work of her embodied imagination. The art of memory shapes Cavendish’s imagination by which she creates her new world.