Margaret Anne Doody, University of Notre Dame

 “Identity’s Wanderings, Imagination’s Pursuit: Medieval and Early Modern Fictions of Desire and Changeability”

 This talk arises first from my long interest in Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, and second from my very new interest in the influence of Islamic literature upon European fiction. Literary works of both East and West emphasize the high importance given to imagination, reflected  in various  forms and devices of fiction appearing from the early Middle Ages to the 17th century. New fables express dissatisfaction with accepted realities–physical, political, and moral. Islamic writings gave new impetus to the imaginative explorations of European writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, who evidently feel free to borrow quite extensively from the Eastern world. 

    Stories move us towards changeable views of reality, entertaining conflicting (often spiritual) possibilities. Central texts here include Suhrawardi’s tales, Cervantes’ “Persiles y Sigismunda,” and Margaret Cavendish’s “Blazing World.” 

Margaret Anne Doody is Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she was the first Director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program. She has specialised in the study of eighteenth-century literature and culture and is the author of many articles on the literature of the period, as well as of books on Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney. In 1985 she published The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered for Cambridge University Press (reissued in 2010). She is also the author of the internationally-acclaimed The True Story of the Novel (1996), where she focused on the legacy of the ancient novel. In 2007 she received an NEH fellowship for the research project “The Mystics’ Enlightenment: Pico, della Mirandola, Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme.” Professor Doody is the author of the Aristotle Detective novel series, translated to many languages. She las lately published a new mystery novel, Omicidi in inverno, set in eighteenth-century London (Mondadori, 2022).