Studying 19th Century Black Women Writers

So, one of the highlights this semester for me will be this directed research that I’ll be doing. This is like, taking a class, only I’ll be the only student. That’s a good thing in that I’ll get time and attention (or at least I think I will) with studying and focusing on a subject or genre of particular interest to me. It will be under the direction and guidance of a professor that I’ve chosen, and I’ll be using this information to help prepare for my thesis in the fall. I had to create and propose the syllabus for this research, which had to be accepted by he Language and Literature department head. For me, this subject will be 19th century African American women writers.

The two texts I’ve chosen as primary are Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro American Woman Novelist by Hazel V. Carby and Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 by Francis Smith Foster (a scholar at Emory University that I hope to ultimately have more interaction with). The writers that I’ll be studying are the narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, Francis E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. It will be interesting to study the similarities and the individualities of these black women and their work through the veil of the Victorian era and in the aftermath of the Civil War.