Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist

About this book

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 womens fiction and reassessing 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 Pauline Hopkins.