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Katherine Clay Bassard, Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Abstract

"Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the[Bible]. 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."--Publisher description.

Contents

Talking mules and troubled hermeneutics: Black women's biblical self-disclosures -- Private interpretations: the Bible defense of slavery and nineteenth-century racial hermeneutics -- Sampling the scriptures: Maria W. Stewart and the genre of prayer -- Hannah's craft: biblical passing in The bondwoman's narrative -- "Beyond mortal vision": identification and miscegenation in the Joseph cycle and Harriet E. Wilson's Our nig -- And the greatest of these: eros, philos, and agape in two contemporary Black women's novels.

External links

• [ Google Books]