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Females And Footnotes: Excavating The Genre Of Eighteenth-Century Women’S Scholarly Verse, Ruth Knezevich

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Throughout the eighteenth century, the genre of women’s poetry heavily annotated with editorializing commentary (a genre I term “scholarly verse”) became increasingly prevalent. Such poetry presents an ironic reversal of conventions of gender and authority by incorporating the literal margins of the page: the female voice commands the majority of the page, while the masculine voice of empiricism, authority, and scholarly reason is pushed to the margins. This essay offers a distant reading of the range of annotations women poets provided, in order to begin new conversations about the ways women’s poetry served as a site of and structure for …