In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays in the Bondwoman's Narrative

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Summary: In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays in the Bondwoman
Review: The manuscript of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative-reputedly the first novel by a female African American slave ever found-was discovered two years ago by eminent African American studies scholar Gates Jr. This collection of critical essays on the novel, edited by Gates and Robbins (director, Black Periodic Literature Project, W.E.B. DuBois Inst., Harvard) is a significant contribution to slave narrative and early American literature scholarship. Grouped into five categories, the essays explore the place of the novel in the literary marketplace, particularly within the genres of the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, and the Gothic novel; the novel's relationship with canonical texts like Bleak House and Jane Eyre; the theological, legal, moral, and cultural contexts of pre-Civil War American life as reflected in the novel; the novel's position in the emerging subgenre of African American Gothic; and Hannah Craft's own identity. The contributors, well-known authorities on African American studies (e.g., Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, and Lawrence Buell), argue that Crafts's novel is at once art and chronicle, containing both a fairy-tale ending and historical facts. They also hold that the novel has changed our view of antebellum literature because it reveals the real conditions of servitude and negritude. Essential for all African American collections.