Harriet Wilsons New England: Race, Writing, and Region (Revisting New England: the New Regionalism) - Softcover

Barbara W. White; Eve Allegra Raimon; Henry Louis Gates; JerriAnne Boggis

4.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

9781584656425: Harriet Wilsons New England: Race, Writing, and Region (Revisting New England: the New Regionalism)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584656425 ISBN 13: 9781584656425

Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Harriet E. Wilson, an enterprising woman of mixed racial heritage, wrote an autobiographical novel describing the abuse and servitude endured by a young black girl in the supposedly free North. Originally published in Boston in 1859 and ""lost"" until its 1983 republication by noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, is generally considered the first work of fiction written by an African American woman published in the United States. With this collection, the first devoted entirely to Wilson and her novel, the editors have compiled essays that seek to understand Wilson within New England and New England as it might have appeared to Wilson and her contemporaries. The contributors include prominent historians, literary critics, psychologists, librarians, and diversity activists. Harriet Wilson's New England joins other critical works in the emerging field known as the New Regionalism in resurrecting historically hidden ethnic communities in rural New England and exploring their erasure from public memory. It offers new literary and historical interpretations of Our Nig and responds to renewed interest in Wilson's dramatic account of servitude and racial discrimination in the North.

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Review:

"[m]ost compelling is Boggis's reflective concluding essay, "Not Somewhere Else, but Here." Boggis (founder and director of the Harriet Wilson Project) rightly reminds the reader that the injustices done to African Americans were not confined to the South; they went largely unchecked in the North as well . . . Recommended." --Choice

Choice"

"Boggis' account is immediately engaging. She writes about how meaningful it was to find out that black people like herself and her sons lived in early Milford." "Valley News""

"Harriet Wilson's New England: Race, Writing, and Region, brings the Harriet Wilson story up to date. Events that were only surmised when the first modern volume of "Our Nig" appeared in 1983 have been confirmed, and we see Harriet Wilson as a real person of almost incredible courage and ability, determined to succeed in an age when all the cards seemed stacked against her." "Milford (NH) Cabinet""

"[M]ost compelling is Boggis's reflective concluding essay, "Not Somewhere Else, but Here." Boggis (founder and director of the Harriet Wilson Project) rightly reminds the reader that the injustices done to African Americans were not confined to the South; they went largely unchecked in the North as well . . . Recommended." "Choice""

"The present collection . . . furthers the importance of Wilson's novel in the African American canon. The essays look at the work in the context of place, genre, and gender . . . Recommended." "Choice""

About the Author:

JerriAnne Boggis is Director of the Harriet Wilson Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of Harriet Wilson and her literary work. Eve Allegra Raimon is Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southern Maine and author of The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Antislavery Literature (2004). Barbara A. White is Professor Emerita of Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Beecher Sisters (2003). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is W. E. B. Dubois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

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