Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature

"The Author: Minrose C. Gwin is assistant professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University." "Considering fictional characters and autobiographical reflections of female experience, Minrose C. Gwin explores the volatile, often violent connection between black and white women of the Old South. She shows that their relationship in American literature offers a paradigm of the Southern racial experience---its antipathy and guilt on the one hand, its very real bonding through common suffering on the other. Gwin's study encompasses a wide range of books, including abolitionist and proslavery fiction of the midnineteenth century, women's slave narratives and journals, and modern fictional treatments of Southern slavery by Faulkner, Cather, and Margaret Walker. She analyzes such diverse works as Mary Chesnut's Civil War and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave, Girl. Black and white Southern women in modern fiction, Gwin suggests, come to represent a terrible duality in human nature. Her pioneering interpretation enable us to understand the Southern past more fully, to identify NEW CRITICAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WORKS OF LITERATURE, AND TO DISCERN FRESH IMPLICATIONS OF FEMALE EXPERIENCE." "Also of Interest--- Background in Tennessee Evelyn Scott Tennesseana Editions 324 pages Stories from Tennessee Edited by Linda Burton 432 pages Tennessee Writers Thomas Daniel Young Tennessee Three Star Series 132 pages Illustrations" [from the book of the front and back flap]