Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

By P. Gabrielle Foreman (NHC Fellow, 2003–04)

Nineteenth-Century; African Americans; African American Literature; Authorship; Activism; Cultural History

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009

From the publisher’s description:

Activist Sentiments takes as its subject women who in fewer than fifty years moved from near literary invisibility to prolific productivity. Grounded in primary research and paying close attention to the historical archive, this book offers against-the-grain readings of the literary and activist work of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Frances E. W. Harper, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Amelia E. Johnson.

Part literary criticism and part cultural history, Activist Sentiments examines nineteenth-century social, political, and representational literacies and reading practices. P. Gabrielle Foreman reveals how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary--often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement--emerges in their sentimental, and simultaneously political, literary production.

Subjects
Literature / Gender and Sexuality / Literary Criticism / Nineteenth-Century / African Americans / African American Literature / Authorship / Activism / Cultural History /

Foreman, P. Gabrielle (NHC Fellow, 2003–04). Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. The New Black Studies Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.