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sereneYou may have surmised that I'm enamored of Harriet Jacobs. Here's an annotated bibliography I put together. It's short, but maybe I'll add to it over time.
Doherty, Thomas. "Harriet Jacobs' Narrative Strategies: 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'." Southern Literary Journal 19.1 (Fall 1986): 79-91. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Thomas Doherty examines Jacobs's singular work as a complex mix of sentimental novel and slave narrative, whose frankness about gender and sex, he asserts, is its main strength: "What lends this narrative unique and immediate appeal is, of course, sex—the sex of the narrator, of the audience, and in the story" (81). In addressing the communication between Jacobs as a woman writer and her audience, also presumed to be mostly women (specifically, middle-class Northern women), Doherty gives credit to Jacobs for breaking into an area of literature that had previously been the realm of men. He addresses the context of the emerging voice of women in abolitionist circles, and draws a parallel between the events that Jacobs recounts from her life with the classic sentimental novel of sexual seduction. Jacobs turns this classic form on its head by relating her successful resistance to Dr. Flint's depraved advances, but she does so while using the form as a vehicle, as was the custom in many slave narratives by men: "The skillful slave narrator drew on the conventions of popular literature to render more movingly the stock situations... that were to him only too real" (83). Readers of Doherty's essay will recognize Flint as the stock villain ("'Curse you!' he mutters through clenched teeth" (84)), but Doherty argues that Jacobs is not merely pandering to her audience by using these established devices. Instead, he maintains, she uses it as a wedge to open the door to new ideas about race, gender, and justice to her relatively sheltered readers.
Smith, Caleb. "Harriet Jacobs among the Militants: Transformations in Abolition's Public Sphere, 1859-61." American Literature 84.4 (December 2012): 743-68. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale University, examines the interplay and tension between the white abolitionists of Harriet Jacobs's time and her own mission to align herself with a more radical, militant abolitionism, and still reach a broad audience of potential supporters of abolition. The majority of the article focuses on the decision by Jacobs's editor, Lydia Marie Child, to exclude the final chapter of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, "A Tribute to [John] Brown." This chapter has been lost, but Smith uses letters from Child to Jacobs about the incident, along with an examination of social context, to argue that part of the reason for Child's move was "gendered propriety" (744), a belief that women should talk about certain things in certain ways or risk alienating readers. However, he also asserts that suppressing the chapter, whose content created a linkage between Jacobs and Brown's armed insurrection, was an attempt by white abolitionists of the time to divorce their movement from any hint of violence, and to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 without actually advocating the immediate end of slavery in the American South. Smith discusses the place that gender played in these tensions, as well as the fact that removing the chapter didn't fully achieve its intended goal: "I have argued that Child’s revisions did not confine readers of Jacobs’s testimony to a nonviolent, reformist response; a militant reception, which may have been truer to Jacobs’s own design, remained available to some" (763).
Warner, Anne Bradford. "Harriet Jacobs at Home in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Southern Quarterly. 45.3 (Spring 2008): 30-47. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Warner, Associate Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, argues for the reintegration of Jacobs's several identities, which are often treated separately, depending on the viewpoint of the person addressing her work: "African American, southern, female, literate, and publishing before the Civil War" (30). Jacobs was all of those things, and at once, rather than being an emblem solely as woman writer, or slave narrator, or displaced Southerner. Warner addresses the peculiar "homelessness" that plagued slaves and ex-slaves: they came from the South, had roots and loved ones in the South, but were denied calling that place "home" by the savagery of the slave trade. Bradford makes the important assertion that Jacobs underscores the authority of the Southern voice when talking about slavery: that is, Jacobs asserts directly and indirectly (for example, by using a Southern woman's words in the epigraph to Incidents) that no one truly understands slavery except for those who have been slaves. Moreover, those who aren't Southern cannot fully understand the slave system, even if they are in sympathy with abolition: "Jacobs makes southernness a type of authority and also distinguishes between the lived experience of a place and a discourse about it, whether that discourse be abolitionist rhetoric or sketches from casual social observation" (31). In her portrait of the "home" that Jacobs was forced to leave, Warner pays particular attention to religion and ritual in the South, where "[Jacobs] sees Christian religious tradition and African folk ritual functioning side by side" (42). Warner rightly sees Jacobs's focus on homely traditions and family as more evidence of the brutality of the slave system, and especially on its severing of home and family ties.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative." American Literature. 53.3 (Nov. 1981): 479-86. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Jean Fagan Yellin, historian and Distinguished Professor Emerita at Pace University, wrote this article shortly after Jacobs's letters to Amy Post were discovered. These letters established the legitimacy of her authorship of Incidents, and the article discusses the content and significance of the letters. According to Yellin, "The primary literary importance of Harriet Jacobs' letters to Amy Post is that they establish her authorship of Incidents and define the role of her editor, L. Maria Child" (481). In this brief article, Yellin quotes enough of the letters to give an outline of the events of Jacobs's initial attempts to publish her story, her falling out with Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc. The letters evince a complete awareness and analytical wisdom in Jacobs: she was outraged at being thought dim and savage by white abolitionists such as Stowe, and she was not shy about conveying that outrage to Amy Post, using flawless logic and biting sarcasm, viz.: "Think, dear Amy, that a visit to Stafford House would spoil me, as Mrs. Stowe thinks petting is more than my race can bear. Well, what a pity we poor blacks can't have the firmness and stability of character that you white people have!" (483). Yellin's chief purpose is to articulate the importance of the letters in establishing Incidents as an important and legitimate piece of American literature, but she also paints a compelling portrait of Jacobs herself, through a sampling of entries about Jacobs's fears, challenges, and reaction to her early successes and failures in her quest to find a publisher for her memoir.
Doherty, Thomas. "Harriet Jacobs' Narrative Strategies: 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'." Southern Literary Journal 19.1 (Fall 1986): 79-91. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Thomas Doherty examines Jacobs's singular work as a complex mix of sentimental novel and slave narrative, whose frankness about gender and sex, he asserts, is its main strength: "What lends this narrative unique and immediate appeal is, of course, sex—the sex of the narrator, of the audience, and in the story" (81). In addressing the communication between Jacobs as a woman writer and her audience, also presumed to be mostly women (specifically, middle-class Northern women), Doherty gives credit to Jacobs for breaking into an area of literature that had previously been the realm of men. He addresses the context of the emerging voice of women in abolitionist circles, and draws a parallel between the events that Jacobs recounts from her life with the classic sentimental novel of sexual seduction. Jacobs turns this classic form on its head by relating her successful resistance to Dr. Flint's depraved advances, but she does so while using the form as a vehicle, as was the custom in many slave narratives by men: "The skillful slave narrator drew on the conventions of popular literature to render more movingly the stock situations... that were to him only too real" (83). Readers of Doherty's essay will recognize Flint as the stock villain ("'Curse you!' he mutters through clenched teeth" (84)), but Doherty argues that Jacobs is not merely pandering to her audience by using these established devices. Instead, he maintains, she uses it as a wedge to open the door to new ideas about race, gender, and justice to her relatively sheltered readers.
Smith, Caleb. "Harriet Jacobs among the Militants: Transformations in Abolition's Public Sphere, 1859-61." American Literature 84.4 (December 2012): 743-68. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale University, examines the interplay and tension between the white abolitionists of Harriet Jacobs's time and her own mission to align herself with a more radical, militant abolitionism, and still reach a broad audience of potential supporters of abolition. The majority of the article focuses on the decision by Jacobs's editor, Lydia Marie Child, to exclude the final chapter of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, "A Tribute to [John] Brown." This chapter has been lost, but Smith uses letters from Child to Jacobs about the incident, along with an examination of social context, to argue that part of the reason for Child's move was "gendered propriety" (744), a belief that women should talk about certain things in certain ways or risk alienating readers. However, he also asserts that suppressing the chapter, whose content created a linkage between Jacobs and Brown's armed insurrection, was an attempt by white abolitionists of the time to divorce their movement from any hint of violence, and to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 without actually advocating the immediate end of slavery in the American South. Smith discusses the place that gender played in these tensions, as well as the fact that removing the chapter didn't fully achieve its intended goal: "I have argued that Child’s revisions did not confine readers of Jacobs’s testimony to a nonviolent, reformist response; a militant reception, which may have been truer to Jacobs’s own design, remained available to some" (763).
Warner, Anne Bradford. "Harriet Jacobs at Home in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Southern Quarterly. 45.3 (Spring 2008): 30-47. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Warner, Associate Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, argues for the reintegration of Jacobs's several identities, which are often treated separately, depending on the viewpoint of the person addressing her work: "African American, southern, female, literate, and publishing before the Civil War" (30). Jacobs was all of those things, and at once, rather than being an emblem solely as woman writer, or slave narrator, or displaced Southerner. Warner addresses the peculiar "homelessness" that plagued slaves and ex-slaves: they came from the South, had roots and loved ones in the South, but were denied calling that place "home" by the savagery of the slave trade. Bradford makes the important assertion that Jacobs underscores the authority of the Southern voice when talking about slavery: that is, Jacobs asserts directly and indirectly (for example, by using a Southern woman's words in the epigraph to Incidents) that no one truly understands slavery except for those who have been slaves. Moreover, those who aren't Southern cannot fully understand the slave system, even if they are in sympathy with abolition: "Jacobs makes southernness a type of authority and also distinguishes between the lived experience of a place and a discourse about it, whether that discourse be abolitionist rhetoric or sketches from casual social observation" (31). In her portrait of the "home" that Jacobs was forced to leave, Warner pays particular attention to religion and ritual in the South, where "[Jacobs] sees Christian religious tradition and African folk ritual functioning side by side" (42). Warner rightly sees Jacobs's focus on homely traditions and family as more evidence of the brutality of the slave system, and especially on its severing of home and family ties.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative." American Literature. 53.3 (Nov. 1981): 479-86. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.
Jean Fagan Yellin, historian and Distinguished Professor Emerita at Pace University, wrote this article shortly after Jacobs's letters to Amy Post were discovered. These letters established the legitimacy of her authorship of Incidents, and the article discusses the content and significance of the letters. According to Yellin, "The primary literary importance of Harriet Jacobs' letters to Amy Post is that they establish her authorship of Incidents and define the role of her editor, L. Maria Child" (481). In this brief article, Yellin quotes enough of the letters to give an outline of the events of Jacobs's initial attempts to publish her story, her falling out with Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc. The letters evince a complete awareness and analytical wisdom in Jacobs: she was outraged at being thought dim and savage by white abolitionists such as Stowe, and she was not shy about conveying that outrage to Amy Post, using flawless logic and biting sarcasm, viz.: "Think, dear Amy, that a visit to Stafford House would spoil me, as Mrs. Stowe thinks petting is more than my race can bear. Well, what a pity we poor blacks can't have the firmness and stability of character that you white people have!" (483). Yellin's chief purpose is to articulate the importance of the letters in establishing Incidents as an important and legitimate piece of American literature, but she also paints a compelling portrait of Jacobs herself, through a sampling of entries about Jacobs's fears, challenges, and reaction to her early successes and failures in her quest to find a publisher for her memoir.