Moira Ferguson

This book shows how eighteenth-century women's literature redefined nation and culture in class and gendered terms.

Nation, Class, and Gender

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets

Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, this study investigates how white and Afro-Caribbean women writers have responded to feminist, abolitionist and post-emancipationist issues. It aims to reveal a relationship between colonial exploitation and female sexual oppression.

East Caribbean Connections

Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid

" "Moira Ferguson has selected wisely from well-known and little-known figures and from fiction, polemic and poetry to illustrate the long and diverse history of feminist reflection up to and including Mary Wollstonecraft.... Good reading for scholars and a fine book for classroom use." -- Natalie Zemon Davis." -- from back cover.

British Women Writers, 1578-1799

First Feminists

Janet Todd

Mary Wollstonecraft

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834

Subject to Others (Routledge Revivals)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda and the Caribbean

Nine Black Women

Anne Hart Gilbert

Elizabeth Hart Thwaites

Daughter of a black slaveholder father, Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites were among the first educators of slaves and free African Caribbeans in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Antigua. These members of the "free colored" community who married white men and played an active role as educators, antislavery activists, and Methodist evangelicals were also among the first African Caribbean female writers. This exceptional volume offers for the first time a collection of their writings. Because the records of the Hart sisters are rare and original testimony from black women of the time, they will be of great interest to the modern scholar. Autobiographical and biographical narrative, along with antislavery tracts, hymns, devotional poetry, and religious documents vividly reveal the lives of these courageous women. Their writings illuminate the complex of racial, spiritual, and class- and gender-based divisions, as well as attitudes, of Anglophone Caribbean society. Moira Ferguson's introduction situates the Hart sisters in historical context and explains how their writings helped establish a specific black Antiguan cultural identity.

Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals

The Hart Sisters

Argues that Paule Marshall’s work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall’s novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall’s fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall’s work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters’ interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery’s wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds. “In sophisticated yet accessible discussions, Ferguson places Marshall’s work in a variety of contexts that are at the center of diasporic and postcolonial studies. By producing this comprehensive examination of Marshall’s fiction, she captures the way in which Marshall not only writes about diasporic experiences but, through the interconnected themes of her novels, is crafting a diasporic saga on the subject.” — Sharon M. Harris, author of Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832–1919

The African Diaspora and Paule Marshall’s Fiction

A Human Necklace

As a writer who has been quoted as saying she writes to save her life- that is she couldn't write, she would be a revolutionary- Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid translates this passion into searing, exhilarating prose. Her weaving of history, autobiography, fiction, and polemic has won her a large readership. In this first book-length study of her work, Moira Ferguson examines all of Kincaid's writing up to 1992, focusing especially o their entwinement of personal and political identity. In doing so, she draws a parallel between the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in Kincaid's fiction and the more political relationship of the colonizer and the colonized. Ferguson calls this effect the "doubled mother"- a conception of motherhood as both colonial and biological.

Moira Ferguson

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