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Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics
Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a
book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a
slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited
a profound gift for verse, publishing her first poem in 1767.
Her tribute to a famed pastor, “On the Death of the Rev.
Mr. George Whitefield,” followed in 1770, catapulting her
into the international spotlight, and publication of her 1773
Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in London created
her an international star. Despite the attention she received
at the time, history has not been kind to Wheatley. Her work
has long been neglected or denigrated by literary critics and
historians. John C. Shields, a scholar of early American
literature, has tried to help change this perception, and
Wheatley has begun to take her place among the elite of
American writers. In Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age,
Shields contends that Wheatley was not only a brilliant writer
but one whose work made a significant impression on renowned
Europeans of the Romantic age, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who borrowed liberally from her works, particularly in his
famous distinction between fancy and imagination. Shields shows
how certain Wheatley texts, particularly her “Long
Poem,” consisting of “On Recollection,”
“Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and
“On Imagination,” helped shape the face of
Romanticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age helps demolish the
long-held notion that literary culture flowed in only one
direction: from Europe to the Americas. Thanks to
Wheatley’s influence, Shields argues, the New World was
influencing European literary masters far sooner than has been
generally understood.
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Phillis Wheatley : poet of the revolutionary era
Provides a close-up look at this young African woman who became a celebrated poet of her time, writing elegies, or tributes to people she admired, as well as poems that used the themes of America's struggle for independence.
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Phillis Wheatley
WithPoems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral(1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman-of any race or background- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. InPhillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status.
A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography.
Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.
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Phillis Wheatley : biography of a genius in bondage
Reveals the fascinating life of Phillis Wheatley, the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book, and only the second woman to do so in America, and also to do so while she was a slave and a teenager.
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New Essays on Phillis Wheatley
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. John C. Shields is
Distinguished Professor of English at Illinois State
University. He is the editor of
The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and author of
The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American
Self, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book;
Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics ; and
Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation; and
awarded honorable mention in competition for the American
Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize.
As well, Shields serves as director of the Center for
Classicism and American Culture and General Editor for the
series of monographs on Classicism in American Culture to be
published by the University of Tennessee Press. Eric D. Lamore
is an assistant professor of English at the University of
Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, and a contributor to
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and
Poetry.
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The odyssey of Phillis Wheatley : a poet's journeys through American slavery and independence
\"A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution\"-- Provided by publisher.
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\On the Death of Love Rotch,\ a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters)
This article argues that the manuscript poem \"On the Death of Love Rotch\" recently recovered from a Quaker commonplace book kept in 1782 can be confidently attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters). The attribution of the poem provides crucial new evidence for Wheatley's early presence and influence in Nantucket, New Bedford, and Newport; supplies new evidence for how her poems first appear in these regions that map onto Quaker ministerial routes; and bares traces of her poetic and political influence on these hotbeds for early abolitionist efforts. In addition to placing Wheatley physically closer to Obour Tanner and others in the Newport community before the Revolution, the poem's presence points toward other communities of color Wheatley engaged with, including New Guinea and Philadelphia, and the possibility that she wrote an elegy for a Black woman named Rose. Combined the article not only makes a case for the expansion of the Wheatley canon but also demonstrates how attribution studies can inform knowledge of the author's life, location, activities, public contributions, and influence on the larger cultural climate.
Journal Article
Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters through Black Liberation Theology
This essay argues that it is productive to teach Phillis Wheatley Peters through the framework of Black liberation theology, an exegetical tradition that understands the Bible to be a liberatory text and God as siding with the oppressed. While Dr. James Cone–inspired by theological movements in Latin America, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X–named this school of thought in the late 1960s, its existence as an interpretative practice and form of life predates Cone's naming by at least two hundred years. Approaching Wheatley Peters's work from this vantage, I show, enables us to teach students how she's challenging and reordering the reining taxonomies of her era. This approach thus scaffolds students away from their most common misreadings of Wheatley as an accommodationist on the one hand, or a savvy manipulator of religious discourse on the other. Black liberation theology also helps us move students beyond their overreliance on irony/sarcasm as an explanatory framework by providing a heuristic that's grounded in late eighteenth-century racial, theological, and sociopolitical tensions.
Journal Article
The Age of Phillis
\"An arresting and meticulously researched collection of poems\" about the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first black woman to publish a book in America ( Ms.Magazine ). In 1773, a young African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).
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