A Brighter Coming Day

"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was the most important and the most popular black feminist abolitionist writer and activist of the nineteenth century. A Brighter Day Coming, the most comprehensive collection of her works, includes all the poems from Harper's extant original volumes, plus many that have never been collected and one that was discovered in manuscript; speeches; and a selection of prose, including excerpts from the novel Iola Leroy and the serialized novel Fancy Etchings, and a generous group of letters ..."--Back cover.

The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

While conservative groups have often appealed to the Bible to support their positions, so too have many progressive voices rooted in the Bible, seeing their struggles in its narratives and characters, and drawing on its verses to prove the truth of their arguments. Abolitionism countered pro-slavery arguments with copious biblical material. Women's rights advocates strongly disagreed with one another about whether the Bible was good news for their cause, but some argued that it was. Temperance, a broadly inclusive reform movement in the nineteenth century, employed arguments that reflected a critical, non-literalist stance to the text. Civil rights speakers identified with biblical figures and struggles, infusing their rhetoric with familiar verses. The Progressives' Bible foregrounds women, especially women of color, like Maria Stewart, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also considering the works of crucial figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. A final chapter describes contemporary social justice movements that draw strength from biblical and religious traditions, from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives.

This work examines the role of women poets of African descent in shaping the history of the Americas. Focusing on three women whose poetry wrestled with the sociopolitical predicaments of the late 19th century, the book ventures a broader definition of African American literature by placing it in a hemispheric context.

Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Special attention is paid to leading exponents of the genre such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as many other, less well known examples. Further essays explore the rediscovery of the slave narrative and its subsequent critical reception, as well as the uses to which the genre is put by modern authors such as Toni Morrison. With its chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion provides both an easy entry point for students new to the subject and comprehensive coverage and original insights for scholars in the field.