Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change
Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865

Kari J. Winter

Reviews

“In juxtaposing slave narratives and gothic novels, Winter does not erase difference; instead she provocatively details ‘the social ordering of power’ in ways that illuminate the boundaries of genre, race, and nation.”
—Journal of American History

“Carefully researched and well-documented, this fine study attempts to balance current political and theoretical sensibilities about feminism and race with the contemporary dilemmas of writers who confronted the oppression of women and the abuses of slavery.”
—American Literature


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Description
Analyzing the historical contexts in which female Gothic novels and slave narratives were composed, Kari J. Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and represent terrifying aspects of life for women. Careful not to equate the status of slave and female, Winter reads both genres as sites of ideological struggle to examine how they engaged the dominant classist, racist, patriarchal discourse and created possibilities for new, feminist ways of thinking. Authors whose works are considered include Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Nancy Prince, Louisa Picquet, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë.
Page count: 186 pp.
Trim size: 6 x 9
  

Paper
List price: $22.95
978-0-8203-3699-2
7/1/2010

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Kari J. Winter is a professor of American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is editor of The Blind African Slave: or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jeffrey Brace.