In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative
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Overview
Three years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black women anywhere. The Bondwoman's Narrative was published in 2002. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings together twenty-two authorities on African-American studies to examine such issues as authenticity, and the history and criticism of this unique novel, including Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Shelley Fisher-Fishkin.The Bondwoman's Narrative will take its place in the African-American canon, and In Search of Hannah Crafts is the book that scholars and students of African-American Studies, of women writers, and of slavery, need to have to understand this unprecedented historical and literary event.Synopsis
Top African-American Studies scholars examine the history and reception of The Bondwoman's Narrative, the slave narrative that has changed how we view antebellum literature.
Library Journal
The manuscript of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative-reputedly the first novel by a female African American slave ever found-was discovered two years ago by eminent African American studies scholar Gates Jr. This collection of critical essays on the novel, edited by Gates and Robbins (director, Black Periodic Literature Project, W.E.B. DuBois Inst., Harvard) is a significant contribution to slave narrative and early American literature scholarship. Grouped into five categories, the essays explore the place of the novel in the literary marketplace, particularly within the genres of the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, and the Gothic novel; the novel's relationship with canonical texts like Bleak House and Jane Eyre; the theological, legal, moral, and cultural contexts of pre-Civil War American life as reflected in the novel; the novel's position in the emerging subgenre of African American Gothic; and Hannah Craft's own identity. The contributors, well-known authorities on African American studies (e.g., Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, and Lawrence Buell), argue that Crafts's novel is at once art and chronicle, containing both a fairy-tale ending and historical facts. They also hold that the novel has changed our view of antebellum literature because it reveals the real conditions of servitude and negritude. Essential for all African American collections.-Aparna Zambare, Central Michigan Univ. Libs., Mount Pleasant Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.