Missing intertexts: Hannah craft's the Bondwoman's Narrative and African American literary history

Citation

Ballinger G, Lustig T & Townshend D (2005) Missing intertexts: Hannah craft's the Bondwoman's Narrative and African American literary history. Journal of American Studies, 39 (2), pp. 207-237. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875805009692

Abstract
First paragraph: The publication of The Bondwoman's Narrative (apparently the earliest novel by a female slave and the only surviving holograph manuscript by any slave) has been a major event in the field of African American studies. Much of the early work on the novel has been devoted to evaluating Crafts's use of the conventions of the slave narrative, of nineteenth-century women's writing and of Gothic literature, as well as to assessing her references to the Bible and to authors ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charlotte Bronte¨ to Charles Dickens. Hollis Robbins has argued that Crafts's use of Dickens is ‘‘productive and interpretive '' ; Hilary Mantel likewise feels that her literary borrowings are ‘‘ intelligent '' ; and, more recently, Lawrence Buell has discussed her ‘‘ creative hermeneutics.'' Our object in this article is to extend these enquiries. In particular, we will consider Crafts's use of a number of tropes specific to late eighteenth-century Gothic writing. We will also assess in some detail the impact of Charles Dickens's Bleak House on The Bondwoman's Narrative. Arguing that the text presents us with intertextual strategies that have not previously been critically examined, we will go on to raise a number of questions about which the novel's critics have so far had rather less to say : why did Crafts make use of intertextuality? What is she doing with her literary references? And, more broadly, how does this latest addition to the canon of African American writing affect the theoretical methods and assumptions often used to define this body of work as a distinctive "tradition"?

Journal
Journal of American Studies: Volume 39, Issue 2