Women writing fancy : authorship and autonomy from 1611 to 1812 / Maura Smyth.

Women Writing Fancy; Acknowledgments; Contents; 1 Introduction: Fancy-The Untold Story of an Aesthetic Rogue; Fancy's Arrival; The Flight of Fancy; Fancy and the History of Women's Writing; Perspectives on Fancy's Flightiness; Part I Defining Modernity and Fixing Fancy; 2 Threads That Go Nowhere in The Tempest and The New Atlantis; The Fanciful Form of the Island; Fragments and Figments of The Tempest; The Fable of The New Atlantis; 3 Finding Fancy in Leviathan and Paradise Lost; Putting the Genie of Fancy Back in the Bottle; Constructing Political Artifice; Fancy in Paradise

Gendered Fancies, Female Sovereignty, and How Things Might BePart II Talking Back: Fanciful 'Creatoresses' of the Novel; 4 Margaret Cavendish's Fashioning of Fancy; Enchanted Matter; Fancy's Flight from Mind to World; Room to Move and Speak; A World of One's Own; Alternate Patterns of the World; 5 Going Undercover with Aphra Behn's "Female Pen"; Agent of Illumination: The Narrator and Her Voice; Materializing Oroonoko; Idealizing Imoinda; The Female Narrator: Painter, Poet, Prophet; 6 Plotting Fancy in The New Atalantis and Fantomina; Varieties of Imagination, Polite, and Otherwise

Narrative Excess in The New AtalantisPlotting Narrative "Intreague" in Fantomina; Part III Fancy's Afterlife; 7 Afterword: Fancy and the Tinctures, Tones, and Flavors of History; "Scanning Deep," or Training a Critical View; Fancifying History; 8 Coda: The Persistence of Fancy; Bibliography; Index