Prospects for the Study of Harriet Jacobs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jean Fagan Yellin’s 1987 annotated edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, Written by Herself, documenting Jacobs as the author and the narrative as nonfiction, ushered in a wave of Jacobs scholarship. Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2003) and the two-volume Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (2008), along with criticism on Incidents in the context of sentimentalism and slave narratives, helped spur another generation of scholarship and popular interest in Jacobs. Jacobs is now found as a source in fields spanning from the expected literature and history to medicine, psychology, political theory, aging, girlhood, and religious studies. This survey of scholarship appearing after the publication of Papers highlights religion, health, biographical studies of Jacobs and her circle, and analysis of Jacobs in popular culture as areas of development and urges more engagement with the archival sources available for Jacobs’s life after the publication of Incidents.