The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

The field of Hopkins studies has also extended to her writings on “Famous Men and Women” of the “Negro” race, biographical sketches of racial uplift that provide valuable information about lesser-known figures in 19th-century African American history. The fact that Peculiar Sam was the first play written, produced, and performed by an African American woman has produced a field of Hopkins studies within African American theater, performance, and popular culture scholarship. Forman’s notion of black women’s literature as inherently “histo-textual” during Hopkins’s time. Such relationships, as well as Hopkins’s play Peculiar Sam (1879) have led many scholars, including Brown and Wallinger, to analyze Hopkins’s work as an act of “racial catharsis”-a form of autobiographical romantic fiction that supports Gabrielle P.

Hopkins maintained early intellectual connections with abolitionist writer William Wells Brown, from whom she won her first literary award, as well as with her uncle, famous African American antebellum poet Elijah W. Born in Maine and raised in Boston, where she spent all but a few years of her life, Hopkins’s Colored American Magazine (1900–1904) and New Era Magazine chronicle African American political, cultural, and literary discourse in a region of the country-New England-that is often overlooked for its impact on African American history at the turn of the 20th century. Literary biographies by Ira Dworkin and Hanna Wallinger establish Hopkins as a significant contributor to African American literature and print culture, while Lois Brown’s biography situates Hopkins and her work within Boston’s antebellum abolitionism, post-bellum black theater, woman’s era Progressivism, and black nationalism during the era of World War I. Since she was rediscovered by Fisk University librarian and scholar Ann Shockley in the early 1970s, Pauline Hopkins’s work as a playwright, editor, essayist, and cultural critic has influenced the field of Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and African-American studies scholarship. Additionally, the serialized novels Hagar’s Daughter (1901), Winona (1902), and Of One Blood (1903) established Hopkins as the leading African American woman editor with their appearance in the Colored American Magazine. Her most anthologized novel, Contending Forces (1900), uses racial passing, black women’s sexual exploitation by white men under slavery, and racial uplift literary tropes to describe black life in the long nadir at the turn of the 20th century. 1930) was the most prolific African American woman writer during the “post-bellum/pre-Harlem” era as described by contemporary Charles W.

The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins