Women Writing Fancy

Maura Smyth is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows

.- Introduction Fancy: The Untold Story of an Aesthetic Rogue.- Threads That Go Nowhere in The Tempest and The New Atlantis.- Finding Fancy in Leviathan and Paradise Lost.- Margaret Cavendish's Fashioning of Fancy.- Going Undercover with Aphra Behn's 'Female Pen'.- Plotting Fancy in The New Atalantis and Fantomina.- Fancy and the Tinctures, Tones, and Flavors of History.-The Persistence of Fancy.

"It offers not only an entirely new way of thinking about how creativity was conceptualized in the early modern period, but also a model of fine-grained, imaginative textual criticism that gives proper consideration to the fleeting, overlooked, and imperfect spaces in which such creativity was practiced by women." (Natasha Simonova, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 14 (1), 2019)

“It offers not only an entirely new way of thinking about how creativity was conceptualized in the early modern period, but also a model of fine-grained, imaginative textual criticism that gives proper consideration to the fleeting, overlooked, and imperfect spaces in which such creativity was practiced by women.” (Natasha Simonova, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 14 (1), 2019)