Stenke, Katarina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4006-3826 (2026) Making time for family: gendered negotiations and blended temporalities in eighteenth-century watch-paper verse. Women's Writing. ISSN 0969-9082 (Print), 1747-5848 (Online) (In Press)

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Abstract

Scholars of Nonconformist culture and women’s writing have long recognized the complexity and variance of practice and experience across denominational and other groupings. Yet the way in which time in particular is experienced and shaped by historical actors is hard to pin down, residing in ephemerality and detail, multivalent in its manifestations, and resistant to uni-modal analysis. This article addresses these methodological challenges by considering both “text’ and “context” in deliberately capacious terms. It assembles different kinds of evidence and combines close textual analysis and conventional modes of historical contextualization with analysis of material records that draws on approaches in material history and manuscript studies. It close-reads the texts of a group of unpublished eighteenth-century “watch-paper” poems and summarizes the experiences of time articulated in personal and professional correspondence. This textual evidence is set alongside records and surviving examples of contemporary printed and hand-made watch-papers, a substantial body of evidence that is little studied but, as this article shows, provides richly suggestive records of temporal iconography and poetics in the late eighteenth century. These in turn help bring into focus non- or para-textual evidence from the manuscript sheets on which the poems appear. This intermedial triangulation reveals in vivid and concrete terms how the time experienced, organized and represented by particular eighteenth-century Nonconformist women writers could be at once gendered and denominationally inflected, yet also closely entwined with, and related to, temporalities that ramify outwards from person to household, to congregation, to nation, breaching differences of gender and occupation, and cuing Nonconformist devotional rhythms to the multiple, geographically extended temporal scales that orchestrate somatic, domestic, commercial, and political experience in eighteenth-century Britain.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Accepted by special issue editor; full issue ms currently with journal for review
Uncontrolled Keywords:	eighteenth-century religious poetry, Nonconformist women’s writing, Anne Steele, manuscript culture, watch-papers, time in poetry, material culture, eighteenth-century timber trade, collaborative authorship, sibling relations, empire and domesticity
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Last Modified:	19 Jun 2026 16:27
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53792

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