Recalling the poetics and politics of the exilic and migrant other in some English women’s poetry

Abstract

This article aims to readdress the issue of the pervasive appropriation of the poetic and political trope of the exilic and migrant Other in some English women’s poetry of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to understand and to demonstrate how the literary representation of this haunted figure of existential displacement has evolved in the specific context of women’s writing in England. Some personal, cultural and historical contexts (marriage, death, revolution, war, colonial expansion, economic crisis) for the emergence of this Other Self will thus be retraced and analysed in parallel with a reconsideration of the poetic genres and forms (the epic, the memoir, the verse epistle, the travelogue, the narrative in verse, the dramatic monologue) that have privileged an approach to the issues of geographical and cultural displacement or mobility in literature. The individual and collective memories of the exilic and migrant Other that these women poets from different periods experience, recall and reconstruct in their texts could serve either as a powerful metaphor or trope for women’s identification with difference and otherness in an increasingly multicultural world or function eventually as a critique of male geographical de-rootedness and historical forgetfulness.