Remapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo Poetry

Abstract

This chapter reveals how women poets in the brief Post-Waterloo period used linguistic and structural play to resist stable notions of femininity, war, and the text itself. Felicia Hemans and critically overlooked Jane Alice Sargant manipulated the printed page to map new movements between supposedly separate bodies and texts to uncover half-hidden voices that counter limited ideologies of wartime participation. Hemans and Sargant created this new page by guiding readers’ eyes across juxtaposing genres, gendered bodies, nonhuman natures, battlefield accoutrements, and quoted speech. The chapter argues that these manipulations of body, gender, and text critique expected materialities of war and war poetry that relied on gender distinctions to determine one’s role and place during war.