Reconstructing Womanhood The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist [Paperback]

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 women's 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.

The best book I have read on this topic. Clear, well-researched, and well-written. Clarifies huge historical, political, and cultural issues. --Dan Fineman,Occidental College

A landmark contribution....[Carby] offers trenchant critical analyses of the writing of Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Nella Larsen, among others; but she is primarily concerned with examining the cultural position of the black woman intellectual. A powerful instance of black feminist cultural history and literary theory, [this book] explores the ways in which black women writers represented the prevailing ideological debates of their times. --The Women's Review of Books

Carby's patient textual and historical work reveals clearly how idfferent public spheres of discourse and address exist simultaneously and manifest their contradictory modes of address within, not just between, texts....Reconstructing Womanhoodbrings to light major neglected women authors, revolutionizes the history of African-American literary culture, and contributes significantly to the current cultural studies effort to recast the relations between dominant and less powerful American cultures. Finally, in historicizing womanhood , this text vitalizes the relation between academic theory and the contemporary feminist struggle to recognizel#ù