Gender and Materiality on the Eighteenth-Century Page

This article explores a series of it-narratives that claim to be told by pens, pages, and texts. In making the materials of writing the object of fictional exploration, these narratives reveal the strong association between the quill and paper with the female body in the period. However, it-narratives also introduce the physicality of reading as a literal point of contact between the body and the text, suggesting that figurative descriptions of gender fail to name the specificity, and the power, of the individual reader’s body.