Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century

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William L. Andrews
Indiana University Press, 1986 - 245 páginas
"In Sisters of the Spirit three black American women recreate their lives and proclaim their faith in themselves as women with an empowering mission. As preachers of the Christian gospel, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote helped to launch a feminist revolution in American religious life and in American society as a whole. In 1836, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee challenged traditional female roles with an argument for women's spiritual authority. Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs (1846) recounts not only its author's struggle for legitimacy as a preacher but also her dangerous preaching missions to the slave states. After the Civil War, Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879) testifies to the growth of a more explicitly feminist message in black women's spiritual autobiography. These three autobiographies are important literary and historical documents, as well as valuable self-portraits of three major forebears of the black feminist literary traition in America"--Back cover.

Contenido

TEXTUAL NOTE
23
Memoirs of the Life Religious Experience Ministerial
49
An Autobiographical
161
NOTES
235
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Acerca del autor (1986)

William L. Andrews was born in 1946. He earned his B.A. from Davidson College in 1968. He received his M.A. in 1970 and Ph.D. in 1973, respectively, from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he is currently the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English. His first book, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, published in 1980, deals with a seminal figure in the development of African American and Southern American prose fiction. While researching To Tell a Free Story, a history of African American autobiography up to 1865, Andrews became greatly interested in autobiography studies. Since 1988 he has been the general editor of a book series, titled Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography, which is published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Since the mid-1980's he has done a considerable amount of editing of African American and southern literature and criticism. The fruition of this work has been The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published in 1997, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, also published in 1997, and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, three big collaborative projects that Andrews has co-edited. He went on to be the series editor of North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, a complete digitized library of autobiographies and biographies of North American slaves and ex-slaves, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ameritech, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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