Love and Marriage in Early African America (Northeastern Library of Black Literature)
“These selections not only enable a new reading of the works of well-known authors . . . but they also enrich our understanding of how African American men and women, enslaved and ‘free,’ imagine gender roles and relations as they ‘encounter the world's troubles’ . . . Foster’s project is a moving testament to the importance of historical recovery.”—Legacy“Rewarding . . . Foster’s anthology, Love and Marriage in Early African America, affords readers an unprecedented view of heterosexual courtship and marriage in the African American community, and it is especially important in its contribution to our knowledge of African American writing before the Civil War.”—American Literature"This is one of those books that readers will find difficult to put down no matter how familiar they are with the literature. General readers and scholars alike will find much to admire ponder, and even smile at . . . . A rich treasure trove." —Journal of African American History“Frances Smith Foster’s Love and Marriage in Early African America is a stunning reply to the pre-modern discourse concerning race and the emotive black body. . . . From the perhaps surprising evidence that Phillis Wheatley ‘did have a love life,’ to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s passionate poems of ‘lowly life,’ to the. . . verse and fiction of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Hopkins, to the letters and ‘autobiographical accounts’ of slavery, resistance, and loss, Love and Marriage in Early African America is a trove of all-but-forgotten and canonical writings about how, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, black people remained whole in a world that wanted them in pieces.”—African American Review