Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

by  (Author),  (Preface),  (Afterword)

With a New Preface, Introduction, and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
New Afterword by Barbara White
A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

• Publisher :  Vintage; 3rd edition (April 16, 2002)
• Language :  English
• Paperback :  304 pages
• ISBN-10 :  1400031206
• ISBN-13 :  978-1400031207
• Item Weight :  9.9 ounces
• Dimensions :  5.18 x 0.61 x 7.98 inches
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• Review:
• "Our Nig is a fascinating and revealing historical document that transmogrifies the rhetorical devices of the sentimental 'woman's novel' into an early Afro-American commentary on race, class, and poverty in mid-nineteenth-century America. Professor Gates' introduction and critical apparatus describe the detective work that established Harriet E. Wilson's authorship; Professor Gates also places the book within the widest literary and historical context." David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University 
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