Well known in her day as a singer, playwright, novelist, and editor of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline Hopkins (1859 1930) has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention over the last twenty years. Nevertheless, her novels have not received their critical due. The Motherless Child, the first book-length study of Hopkins s major fictions, fills this critical gap, offering a sustained analysis of motherlessness in Contending Forces, Hagar s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood.

Well known in her day as a singer, playwright, author, and editor of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline Hopkins (1859--1930) has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention over the last twenty years. Academic review of her many accomplishments, however, largely overlooks Hopkins's contributions as novelist. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, the first book-length study of Hopkins's major fiction, fills this gap, offering a sustained analysis of motherlessness in Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood. Motherlessness appears in all of Hopkins's novels. The motif, Jill Bergman asserts, resonated profoundly for African Americans living with the legacy of abduction from a motherland and familial fragmentation under slavery. In her novels, motherlessness serves as a trope for the national alienation of post-Reconstruction African Americans. The longing and search for a maternal figure, then, represents an effort to reconnect with the absent mother -- a missing parent and a lost African history and heritage. In Hopkins's oeuvre, the image of the mother of African heritage -- a source of both identity and persecution -- becomes a source of power and possibility. Bergman shows how historical events -- such as Bleeding Kansas, the execution of John Brown, and the Middle Passage -- gave rise to a sense of motherlessness and how Hopkins's work engages with that of other contemporaneous race activists. This illuminating study opens new terrain not only in Hopkins scholarship, but also in the complex interchanges between literary, African American, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial studies.

Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-02). The novel features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic revelations, and extraordinary plot twists, including a high-profile murder trial, an abduction plot, and a steady succession of surprises as the young black maid Venus Johnson assumes male clothing to solve a series of mysteries. Because Hagar’s Daughter demonstrates Hopkins’s keen sense of history, use of multiple literary genres, emphasis on gender roles, and political engagement, it provides the perfect introduction to the author and her era. In the appendices to this Broadview Edition, advertising, other writing by Hopkins and her contemporaries, and reviews situate the work within the popular literature and political culture of its time.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work. JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins’s life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women’s voices, Hopkins’s texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins’s era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors, including Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. Accessible to undergraduates and academics alike, this Companion surveys the critical landscape of a rapidly growing field and lays the foundation for future studies.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman's place on its ear, this essay collection studies Gilman's writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space. The contributors present readings of some of Gilman's most significant works. By examining the settings in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman's construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home. Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman's narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman's work that focus on the author's own renouncement of her "natural" role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization. --