Journal article
Chasing Phillis Wheatley: Uncovering other possibilities from the past
The Hedgehog review, Vol.23(3)
10/01/2021
Abstract
Bynum profiles author Phillis Wheatley. She states that she only knows to read her poems and letters on their various eighteenth-century subjects for what she's looking for, and she's looking for an easy-to-spot simple and familiar story of a young woman's enslavement and subsequent freedom. She is reading for a girl--with an unknown birthdate and from somewhere in West Africa--who, in her insufferable living, can only long for freedom. She doesn't have much of anything in my version of her story. There's no family or friends (or maybe just one friend, Obour Tanner), no love or joy, and certainly, no jokes; she limited her living to the difficult reality of her enslavement and the burden of--what she understood to be--a profoundly lonely life. She comments that she imagined the stoic girl of her poetry volume's frontispiece as ennobled by this single-minded, long-suffering pursuit of legal freedom.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Chasing Phillis Wheatley: Uncovering other possibilities from the past
- Creators
- Tara Bynum
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Hedgehog review, Vol.23(3)
- Publisher
- Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
- ISSN
- 1527-9677
- eISSN
- 2324-867X
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/01/2021
- Academic Unit
- African American Studies; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398688602771
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