'She must be Woman at last': The Paratextual Sabotage of Clio in The Epistles of Clio and Strephon

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Epistles of Clio and Strephon (1720), by Martha Fowke and William Bond, is a poetic dialogue of twenty-seven letters between two poets that incorporates a battle for authorial subjectivity. Not only must Clio contend with Strephon's efforts to eroticize her; standing between the reader and Clio's poems are three thresholds of paratexts. The multi-author, hybrid text as a whole illuminates the pressures exerted on women writers by their male peers. Working beyond Genette on textuality, the article engages work on anthology-making, triangulation, elegy's male lineage, and gender-crossing to demonstrate the textual complications of establishing a woman poet's authority.