African American Women Writers

Catalog description

This course offers a survey of writing by African American women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on autobiography and fiction. Beginning with Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and examining late-nineteenth-century fiction by authors such as Harper, the course examines issues of redefining womanhood, participating in racial uplift, and coming to voice as both women and as writers. Moving through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the course may include writers such as Larsen, Fauset, Hurston, Petry, Morrison, Lorde, Naylor, Sapphire, Blackman, Youngblood, and Packer.