​HARPER AT 200

CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The timeline below tracks the growth of scholarship on Harper as well as some of the literature published in her lifetime. Scroll down for a comprehensive list of these works.

Anthologies Including Harper’s Work

Foster, Frances Smith (ed.). A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, 1990.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (ed.). Three Classic African-American Novels, 1990.

McKay, Nellie Y. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds.). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1996.

Pomplum, Tom and Lance Tooks (eds.). African American Classics, 2011.

Robbins, Hollis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds.). The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers, 2017.

Sherman, Joan R. (ed.). African American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927, 1997.

Young, Kevin (ed.). African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, 2020.

Monographs

Boyd, Melba Joyce. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911, 1995.

Callahan, Monique-Adelle. Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics, 2011.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, 1980.

Cutter, Martha J. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing 1850 – 1930, 1999.

Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-century African-American Literature, 1995.

Field, Corinne T. Toward An Intellectual History of Black Women, 2015.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, 2009.

Glass, Kathy. Politics and Affect in Black Women’s Fiction, 2017.

Hack, Daniel. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature, 2017.

Jackson, Virginia. Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, 2023.

Johnson, Wendy Dasler. Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, 2016.

Jones, Martha S. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, 2020.

Lewis, Janaka Bowman. Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings, 2017.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Social Activist, 2014.

McKnight, Utz. Frances E. W Harper : a call to conscience, 2021.

Nurhussein, Nadia. Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry, 2013.

Parker, Alison M. Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State, 2010.

Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the end of Slavery, 2020.

Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, 1989.

Silberman, Lauren R. Wild Women of Maryland: Grit & Gumption in the Free State, 2015.

Sizer, Lyde Cullen. The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872, 2000.

Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern State, 2011.

Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, 1988.

Wilburn, Reginald A. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature, 2014.

Zellinger, Elissa. Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women’s Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, 2020.

Book Chapters

Boyd, Melba Joyce. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ‘In the Situation of Ishmael’” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance, edited by Christopher N. Phillips, 2018.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer, 1825-1911” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965, edited by Ann D. Gordon et al., 1997.

Gardner, Eric. “Reconsidering Moses: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Reconstruction” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, edited by Kathleen Diffley and Coleman Hutchinson, 2022.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Minnie’s Sacrifice: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Narrative of Citizenship” in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, 2001.

McGill, Meredith L. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry” in Early African American Print Culture, edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, 2012.

Novak, Terry. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper” in African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 2000.

Painter, Nell Irvin. “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, edited by Jean H. Baker, 2002.

Select Articles

Brawley, Benjamin. “Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper, and Whitman”, 1917.

Dicken-Garcia, Hazel and Kathryn M. Neal. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Cult of True Womanhood” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, 2009.

Montgomery, Janey Weinhold. “A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetoric of Two Negro Women Orators: Sojourner Truth and Frances E. Watkins Harper,” 1968.

Reference Works

Altman, Susan. Encyclopedia of African American Heritage, 2020.

Baym, Nina and Robert S. Levine (eds.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 2013.

Chambers, Veronica and the Staff of The New York Times. Finish the Fight!: The Brave and Revolutionary Women who fought for the Right to Vote, 2020.

Finkelman, Paul (ed.). Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-First Century, 2009.

Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African American Odyssey, 2011.

Inge, M. Thomas (ed.). The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 2008.

Jackson, Tricia Williams. Women in Black History: Stories of Courage, Faith, and Resilience, 2016.

Jewell, Hannah. 100 Nasty Women of History, 2017.

Logan, Rayford Whittingham. Dictionary of American Negro Biography, 1982.

Mabunda, L. Mpho and Shirelle Phelps (eds.). Contemporary Black Biography, 1996.

McCalman, George with April Reynolds. Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, 2022.

Nicosia, Laura and James F. Nicosia (eds.). Notable American Women Writers, 2020.

Historical Studies

Baker-Rogers, Allener M. and Fasaha M. Taylor. They Carried Us: The Social Impact of Philadelphia’s Black Women Leaders, 2020.

Brown, William Wells. The Black Man: His Antecedents and Genius, 1863.

Commander, Michelle D. (ed.). Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, 2021.

Dannett, Sylvia G.L. Profiles of Negro Womanhood, 1964.

Faulkner, Carol (ed.). Women in American History to 1880: A Documentary Reader, 2011.

Hanaford, Phebe A. Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century, 1883.

Johnson, A. School History of the Negro Race in America, 1890.

Lasser, Carol and Stacey Robertson. Antebellum American Women: Private, Public, Partisan, 2010.

Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, 1992.

Lowenberg, Bert James and Ruth Bogin. Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, 1976.

Major, Monroe. Noted Negro Women, 1893.

O’Connor, Lillian. Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement, 1954.

Payne, Daniel. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1891.

Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists, 1969.

Scruggs, Lawson A. Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character, 1893.

Simpson, Brooks D. (ed.). Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality, 2018.

Still, William. The underground railroad. A record of facts, authentic narratives, letters &c., narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom, 1879.

Ware, Susan (ed.). American Women’s Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote, 1776-1965, 2020.

White, Charles F. Who’s Who in Philadelphia, 1912.

Literary Criticism and Theory

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 1987.

Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 1989.

McDowell, Deborah. “‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1990.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century, 1992.

Wall, Cheryl A. (ed.). Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, 1989.

Yellin, Jean Fagan and Cynthia D. Bond. The Pen is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present, 1991.

Credits

Compiled by Courtney Murray and organized by Samantha de Vera