Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

by Jacobs, Harriet

• ISBN13: 9780393976373
• ISBN10: 0393976378
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-12-13
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

The text is that of the 1861 first edition. Contexts includes contemporary responses to Incidents , selections from Jacobs's other published writings, and extracts from her correspondence. Criticism includes eleven important assessments of the narrative, contributed by Jean Fagan Yellin, Ann Taves, Valerie Smith, Nellie Y. McKay, Harryette Mullen, Michelle Burnham, Nell Irvin Painter, Frances Smith Foster, Sandra Gunning, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Christine Accomando. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Acknowledgments	xxv
The Text of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	1	(160)
Contexts
Contemporary Responses
Linda, the Slave Girl (Liberator, 21 January 1861)	161	(1)
William C. Nell
Unsigned Announcement From the Anti-Slavery Bugle (9 February 1861)	162	(1)
Linda (Liberator, 18 February 1861)	162	(1)
William C. Nell
Letter to John Greenleaf Whittier (4 April 1861)	163	(2)
Lydia Maria Child
Unsigned Announcement Linda (Christian Recorder, 11 January 1862)	165	(2)
Selections from Jacobs's Other Writings
Letter from a Fugitive Slave (New York Tribune, 21 June 1853)	167	(22)
Harriet Jacobs
Letter to Amy Post (25 June 1853)	170	(1)
Cruelty to Slave (New York Tribune, 25 July 1853)	171	(1)
Letter to Amy Post (9 October 1853?)	172	(1)
Letter to Amy Post (18 June 1861)	173	(1)
Life among the Contrabands (Liberator, 5 September 1862)	174	(6)
Letter from Mrs. Jacobs (Black Abolitionist Papers, 13 April 1863)	180	(2)
Letter from Teachers of the Freedmen (National Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 April 1864)	182	(3)
Jacobs School (Freedmen's Record, March 1865)	185	(1)
From Savannah (Freedmen's Record, 18 January 1866)	186	(1)
Savannah Freedmen's Orphan Asylum (Anti-Slavery Reporter, 3 March 1868)	187	(2)
Jacobs's World
From The Convalescent (1859)	189	(4)
Nathaniel Willis
Letters to Harriet Jacobs (13 August 1860; 27 September 1860)	193	(2)
Lydia Maria Child
Jacobs (Linda) School, Alexandria, VA (February 1865)	195	(2)
Freedmen's Record
School at Alexandria (September 1865)	196	(1)
A Milestone of Progress (December 1865)	196	(1)
Eulogy	197	(6)
Reverend Francis J. Grimke
Criticism
Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative	203	(6)
Jean Fagan Yellin
Spiritual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs	209	(13)
Ann Taves
Form and Ideology in Three Slave Narratives	222	(14)
Valerie Smith
The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody	236	(17)
Nellie Y. McKay
Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved	253	(25)
Harryette Mullen
Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault	278	(16)
Michelle Burnham
Three Southern Women and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South	294	(18)
Nell Irvin Painter
Resisting Incidents	312	(18)
Frances Smith Foster
Reading and Redemption in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	330	(23)
Sandra Gunning
The Heady Political Life of Compassion	353	(12)
Elizabeth V. Spelman
``The laws were laid down to me anew'': Harriet Jacobs and the Reframing of Legal Fictions	365	(22)
Christina Accomando
A Chronology	387	(2)
Harriet Jacobs
Selected Bibliography	389