The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have come to dominate the larger Afro-American literary landscape. Yet the works of the writers who founded and nurtured the black women's literary tradition--nineteenth-century Afro-American women--have remained buried in research libraries or in expensive hard-to-find reprints, often inaccessible to twentieth-century readers. Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New...
The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have come t...
Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is a groundbreaking scholarly study of one of America_s most important and most controversial writers. Wheatley (1753-1784) was the first African American to publish a book on any subject in the new country, and America_s second woman to do so. There is probably no other American writer who has produced such critical controversy as Phillis Wheatley. In this new volume, John C. Shields-one of the foremost scholars of Wheatley- demonstrates that much of the negative response to her writings has been based on false assumptions and myths about her and...
Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is a groundbreaking scholarly study of one of America_s most important and most controversial writers. Wheatl...
-John Shields's book is a provocative challenge to the venerable Adamic myth so exhaustively deployed in examinations of early American literature and in American studies. Moreover, The American Aeneas builds wonderfully on Shields's considerable work on Phillis Wheatley. -?--American Literature
-The American Aeneas should be of interest to classicists and American studies scholars alike.- ?--The New England Quarterly
John Shields exposes a significant cultural blindness within American consciousness. Noting the biblical...
Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book
-John Shields's book is a provocative challenge to the venerable Adamic myth so exhaustively ...
Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first poem in 1767. Her tribute to a famed pastor, On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, followed in 1770, catapulting her into the international spotlight, and publication of her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in London created her an international star. Despite the attention she received at the time, history has not been kind to...
Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. Fr...
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753? 1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism. In recent decades, however, Wheatley s work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been...
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753? 1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who re...
