초록 열기/닫기 버튼
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.
