Women Writers, Nineteenth Century Nursery Rhyme and Lyric Innovation

From “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” to “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, some of the most recognizable children's verse in the English language was written by nineteenth century women poets. A close look at this tradition of original nursery rhyme reveals that it is surprisingly experimental and that it enhances our understanding of the ways in which women writers from this period negotiated the relations between gender, genre and authorship. Indeed, children's verse constitutes important evidence of a tradition of generic innovation and lyric experimentation by women writers, who use juvenile poetry to expand the formal potential of the lyric, adapting the conventions of oral verse to develop a new poetic voice for women. More specifically, women writers of juvenile verse develop a lyric voice capable of expressing the complexities of one of the central aspects of nineteenth century female experience: motherhood. The tradition of original nursery rhyme is dominated by mothers. This is not to say that all women who wrote children's verse were literally mothers but that children's poetry from this period has both a maternal context – women reading to preliterate children – and is voiced by maternal speakers. Through an examination of the collaborative Romantic‐era poets Ann and Jane Taylor and the American poet Eliza Lee Follen, the maternal speaker emerges as of central importance to women's poetry. Not only do women writers use maternal speakers to authorize their entry into the commercial literary marketplace, but these writers also use various aspects of maternal experience, including voice and sound, to push the boundaries of the lyric

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Linguistics · Literature · Period (music · Poetry · Reading (process · Rhyme · Romance · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology

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