In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.

The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bront&ës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as &"victim feminism,&" arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that &"professional femininity&"&—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions&—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters&—and readers&—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

Beautifully written, with a powerful series of textual readings, this book looks at the way three centuries of women writers have tackled the subject of race in both Britian and America.

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric – and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contributions. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

The alleged affair between Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and his slave Sally Hemings was proven as a fact by DNA analysis in 1998. While many historians continue to deny the affair, some have accepted the love affair between Jefferson and Hemings as fact, and many historical omissions regarding the affair have been revised since the 1998 DNA results. However, the identity and the dignity of the Hemings family, which were previously ignored in the official history, have been restored not only by science but also by literature. This book examines how African American writers have depicted the issues of race, gender, and identity for Sally Hemings and her descendants in modern and postmodern novels.