@article{438351,
      recid = {438351},
      author = {Shields, John C., and Lamore, Eric D.},
      title = {New essays on Phillis Wheatley [electronic resource] /},
      publisher = {University of Tennessee Press,},
      address = {Knoxville :},
      pages = {1 online resource (xxv, 406 p.)},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {The first African American to publish a book on any  subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) has long been  denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that  a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work,  let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel  Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared  that "the compositions published under her name are below  dignity of criticism." In recent decades, however,  Wheatley's work has come under new scrutiny as the  literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of  African American literature have been reconceived. In these  never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley  scholars consider her work from a variety of angles,  affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers.   The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most  substantial measure of Wheatley's multilayered texts  resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The  contributors consider Wheatley's references to Virgil's  Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well  as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to  her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss  Wheatley's use of the Homeric Trojan horse and  eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom  and her treatment of the classics as political tools.   Engaging Wheatley's multilayered texts with innovative  approaches, the essays in the second section  recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how  her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and  timeless. They ponder Wheatley's verse within the framework  of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah  Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century  "salon culture," and the theoretics of imagination.   Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis  Wheatley's literary achievement and present concrete  evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further  scrutiny},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/438351},
}