Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs, today perhaps the single-most read and studied black American woman of the nineteenth century, has not until recently enjoyed sustained, scholarly analysis. This anthology presents a far-ranging compendium of literary and cultural scholarship which will take its place as the primary resource for students and teachers of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The contributors include both established Jacobs scholars such as Jean Fagan Yellin (biographer and editor of the annotated edition of Incidents), Frances Smith Foster, Donald Gibson, and emerging critics Sandra Gunning, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Anita Goldman. The essays take on a variety of subjects in Incidents, treating representation, gender, resistance, and spirituality from differing angles. The chapters contextualise both the historical figure of Harriet Jacobs and her autobiography as a created work of art; all endeavour to be accessible to a heterogeneous readership.

• First anthology on Harriet Jacobs • Can be used in courses in black studies, American literature, and women’s studies • Jacobs a ‘hot’ subject - dealing with intersections of racial and sexual oppression

Introduction: over-exposed, under-exposed: Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rafia Zafar; 1. I disguised my hand: writing versions of the truth in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and John Jacobs’s A True Tale of Slavery Jacqueline Goldsby; 2. Through her brother’s eyes: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and A True Tale Jean Fagan Yellin; 3. Resisting Incidents Frances Smith Foster; 4. Manifest in signs: the politics of sex and representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl P. Gabrielle Foreman; 5. Earwitness: female abolitionism, sexuality and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Deborah M. Garfield; 6. Reading and redemption in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Sandra Gunning; 7. Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass and the slavery debate: bondage, family and the discourse of domesticity Donald Gibson; 8. Motherhood beyond the gate: Jacobs’s epistemic challenge in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl John Ernest; 9. This poisonous system: social ills, bodily ills and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Mary Titus; 10. Carnival laughter: resistance in Incidents Anne Bradford Warner; 11. Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, and the character of disobedience Anita Goldman; 12. The tender of memory: restructuring value in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Stephanie A. Smith; Conclusion: vexed alliances: race and female collaborations in the life of Harriet Jacobs Deborah M. Garfield.