Reconstructing Womanhood The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist

by Carby, Hazel V.

• ISBN13: 9780195060713
• ISBN10: 0195060717
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1989-07-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A cultural history of the work of nineteenth-century black women writers, this volume traces the emergence of the novel as a forum for political and cultural reconstruction, examining the ways in which dominant sexual ideologies influenced the literary conventions of women's fiction, andreassessing the uses of fiction in American culture. Carby revises the history of the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of intense cultural and political activity by such black women writers as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and PaulineHopkins.

Author Biography

Hazel V. Carby is Professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Yale University

Table of Contents

"Woman's Era": Rethinking Black Feminist Theory	p. 3
Slave and Mistress: Ideologies of Womanhood under Slavery	p. 20
"Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters": Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation	p. 40
"Of Lasting Service for the Race": The Work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper	p. 62
"In the Quiet, Undisputed Dignity of My Womanhood": Black Feminist Thought after Emancipation	p. 95
"Of What Use Is Fiction?": Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins	p. 121
"All the Fire and Romance": The Magazine Fiction of Pauline Hopkins	p. 145
The Quicksands of Representation: Rethinking Black Cultural Politics	p. 163
Notes	p. 177
Bibliography of Texts by Black Women Authors	p. 199
General Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 217
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