Michael Bennett

Vanessa D. Dickerson

A collection of essays exploring black female self-representations across all media includes such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,and Lucille Clifton.

Self-representations by African American Women

Recovering the Black Female Body

First published in 1995. The essays in this volume demonstrate how Victorian women took up various positions along a continuum that ranged from the desire of Shelley’s creature for the power and acceptance it associated with the house to the rejection of Brontë’s heroine of the immobility and powerlessness she ultimately experienced there. More specifically the essays in this volume explore the nature of the Victorian woman’s domestic relations by centring in one activity that most informed her place in what was often the father’s house: housekeeping. The essays in this edition determine how writers, especially novelists, both male and female, used housekeeping to construct, reconstruct, represent, and inscribe the female self and condition. This title will be of interest to students of history and literature.

A Collection of Essays

Keeping the Victorian House

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.

Dark Victorians

An interesting rereading of familiar texts by Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot recovering the historical and literary roots of the supernatural as it appears in each women's work. Dickerson (English, Rhodes College) makes interesting observations about women's changing roles in the 19th century when scientific advancements relegated women to the home as arbiters of the spiritual while men occupied themselves with "rational" invention. Through close readings, she demonstrates how the Brontes, Gaskell, and Eliot resisted this division and, simultaneously, created a spiritual genre of writing traditionally denigrated by critics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Vanessa D. Dickerson

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