Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: A Norton Critical Edition

by Harriet Jacobs, Frances Smith Foster (Editor), Richard Yarborough (Editor)

Overview

“Accompanied by historical photographs, public statements, and correspondence, and by a well-selected sampling of modern criticism, this Norton Critical Edition will stimulate many classroom discussions in years to come.” —Werner Sollors, Harvard University  

“This new edition includes an array of reviews and correspondence along with a fresh and diverse set of scholarly critiques that will help students and instructors understand this remarkable autobiography.” —Bryan Sinche, University of Hartford

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The first edition (1861), with the editors’ explanatory annotations, introduction, and glossary of the people of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
• Three illustrations.
• Key public statements by Harriet Jacobs, William C. Nell, the Reverend Francis J. Grimke, and others.
• A rich selection of correspondence by Harriet Jacobs, Lydia Maria Child, and John Greenleaf Whittier, suggesting Incidents’s initial reception.
• Ten major critical essays, six of them new to the Second Edition.
• A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393614565
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/05/2018
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, to slave parents. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the first full-length narrative written by a former slave woman in America, is a record of events and experiences of slavery seen through the eyes of the young Harriet during the years she lived in captivity in Edenton, through her escape, when she becomes a fugitive in the North at age twenty-nine, and concluding soon after a northern white friend buys her freedom in 1852.

Frances Smith Foster is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Emory University. She is the Editor of The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance and co-editor of The Literature of Slavery and Freedom. She is the author of “Til Death or Distance Do Us Part”: Love and Marriage in African America; Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892; and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and editor of several works, including Love and Marriage in Early African America; Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; and the Norton Critical Edition of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.