| Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible Subjects: American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Bible -- In literature; African American women -- Religion; African American women in literature; Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the "great code" of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective "literary witness" to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. Black women's historic encounters with the Bible were, indeed, transformational; in the process of "turning cursing into blessing" these women were both shaped and reshaped by the scriptures they appropriated for their own self-representation. KATHERINE CLAY BASSARD is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing . |