Iola Leroy

Frances E. W. Harper's fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.

This edition engages the latest research on Harper's life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are too seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper's biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.

Descriere de la o altă ediție sau format:
The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers General Editor: HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have come to dominate the larger African-American literary landscape. Yet the works of the writers who founded and nurtured the black women's literary tradition--nineteenth-century African-American women--have remained buried in research libraries or in expensive hard-to-find reprints, often inaccessible to twentieth-century readers. Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, rescued the voice of an entire segment of the black tradition by offering thirty volumes of these compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism. Responding to the wide recognition this series has received, Oxford now presents four more of these volumes in paperback (to add to the four already available). Each book contains an introduction written by an expert in the field, as well as an overview by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the General Editor.

A most useful novel by which to teach the conflicts surrounding race and gender in the nineteenth century.
Well worth including. I found it to be a wonderful addition
Probably the best-selling novel by an African-American before the twentieth century.
For all its heavy-handed moralizing, [Iola Leroy] purposefully fought the prevailing negative views about blacks.
Clearly Harper's words prove her awareness of the cultural and political functions of narrative. With its intricate plot, about a mulatto who first assumes she is white, subsequently learns she is the daughter of a slave ('the child follows the condition of its mother') and is therefore black, and who ultimately makes the conscious choice not to pass for white but to live as a black woman, Iola Leroy is a novel filled with the complexities and contradictions of black-and-female existence in America in the nineteenth century. While the success of the novel is indisputable in terms of copies sold, what is harder to measure is the extent to which it altered cultural and racial attitudes.
Splendid novel, broad and useful portrait of society during reconstruction from the black point of view.
Praise for the series:
What an astonishing gift...the collection is!
The collaboration among The Schomburg Center, Oxford University Press, and these exceptional scholars is an extraordinary event...but the collection is a spectacular achievement.
In an editorial feat of epic proportions, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has rescued the vast writings of nineteenth-century black women from oblivion....He has reinstated black literary ancestresses to their positions of prominence....Groundbreaking.
A literary treasure-chest....A collection we will have to turn to again and again.
[With] The Schomburg Library, I feel as if I were watching a gigantic ebony figure being unearthed. It is a woman writing.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University.