9780253207869
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Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 share button
Frances Smith Foster
Genre Fiction Books & Literature
Format Paperback
Dimensions 6.10 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 0.74 (d)
Pages 224
Publisher Indiana University Press
Publication Date July 1993
ISBN 9780253207869
Book ISBN 10 025320786X
About Book

"...substantial contribution to African-American Studies and women’s studies." —Mississippi Quarterly

"A bravura performance by an accomplished scholar... it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." —Eighteenth-Century Studies

"... an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster’s work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." —Belles Lettres

"... an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " —Signs

"Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for women who chose to ‘set the record straight’." —Journal of American History

"... fascinating, meticulously researched... Likely to prove seminal in the field... highly recommended... " —Library Journal

"Written by Herself comprises a volume of remarkable female characters whose desires for social change often made them catalysts for spiritual awakening in their own times." —MultiCultural Review

"... an outstanding piece of scholarship... Foster’s book offers deeply intelligent, provocative, totally accessible analysis of a tradition and of writers still not sufficiently read and taught." —American Literature

"Well written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended... " —Choice

The first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the 20th century. From the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in 1686, to the literary tradition that included Jarena Lee and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, this literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to black women.

Reviews

Library Journal

Many existing studies of the history of African American women writers begin with 1892, the year Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice to the South by a Black Woman of the South were published. Foster, author of Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the AnteBelleum Slave Narratives (Greenwood Pr., 1979) and editor of A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (Feminist Pr., 1990), clearly establishes that the literature began much earlier, delineating the female African American literary tradition as it evolved between 1746 and 1892. Her fascinating, meticulously researched study adds greatly to our knowledge of Harper, Cooper, Lucy Terry, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Jarena Lee, Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, and many other writers. She shows the authors adapting existing literary conventions for their own purposes and demonstrates that they were often aware of other African American texts. Likely to prove seminal in the field, this work is highly recommended for all collections with an interest in African American, American, and/or women's literature.-- Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus
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