Henry Louis Gates

Hollis Robbins

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

Critical Essays On The Bondwoman's Narrative

In Search Of Hannah Crafts

Forms of Contention argues for the centrality of sonnet writing to African American poetry, focusing on significant sonnets, key anthologies, and critical debates about poetic form to show that the influence of black sonnet writers on each other challenges long-standing claims that sonnet writing is primarily a matter of European influence. The banishment of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century formal poetry from the black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too ?traditional? long concealed the African American sonnet's legacy. In the twenty-first century, the sonnet has blossomed as a black poetic form, even while sonnet writers rarely acknowledge the rich history of black sonnets. With digital technology, a century of sonnets published in African American newspapers has reemerged to reveal surprising patterns of influence. Historically, academic study of African American literature has focused on four concerns: the historical and economic conditions of production and publication of black literature; the political and cultural importance of black literature in America; genres of and trends in black literature; and the nature of African American literature as reflective of the black experience. Hollis Robbins engages with these concerns while opening up a fifth conversation: auxiliary genealogies of influence for black aesthetic production that foreground form and that promote new conversations about form generally--namely, how exactly form enables participation and protest and the overthrow and undermining of aesthetic expectation. Thus, Robbins uses the sonnet as a case study for exploring the broader literary history of African American literature, offering a thorough analysis of the contentious relationship of an old-world poetic form to new world poetry.

Hollis Robbins

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