Virtually unknown for the better part of the twentieth century, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) is one of the most interesting rediscoveries of recent African American literary history. This is the first study devoted exclusively to Hopkins s life and her influential career as an editor, political writer, social critic, pioneering playwright, biographer, and fiction writer. Hanna Wallinger s discoveries break much new ground, especially regarding Hopkins s relationship with such notable men and women as Booker T. Washington and Anna Julia Cooper, her position in Boston s black women s club...

Contributions emphasize issues of race and ethnicity in the American cultural context, look at class-based, gender-oriented, religious, political, historical, social, and cultural negotiations, and question the meaningfulness of distinctions and boundaries in today's fast-changing world.

Hanna Wallinger is professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg (Austria).

The essays explore the loopholes and retreats employed and exploited by African American polemicists, poets, novelists, slave narrators, playwrights, short story writers, essayists, editors, educators, historians, clubwomen, and autobiographers during the nineteenth century. The contributions use comparative, transnational, literary historical, cultural studies, and Foucauldian perspectives to examine how apparent weakness was turned into strength, and the machinery of oppression into the keys to liberation.