The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: (Including Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood) (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins


The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: (Including Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood) (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
Title : The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: (Including Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood) (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0195063252
ISBN-10 : 9780195063257
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 672
Publication : First published April 14, 1988

First published in May 1900, the Colored American Magazine provided a pioneering forum for black literary talent previously stifled by lack of encouragement and opportunity. Not only a prolific writer for the journal, Pauline Hopkins also served as one of its powerful editorial forces. This volume of her magazine novels, which appeared serially in the journal between March 1901 and November 1903, reveals Hopkins' commitment to fiction as a vehicle for social change. She weaves important political themes into the narrative formulas of nineteenth-century dime-store novels and story papers, which emphasize suspense, action, complex plotting, multiple and false identities, and the use of disguise. Offering both instruction and entertainment, Hopkins' novels also expose the limitations of popular American narrative forms when telling the stories of black characters.

The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: (Including Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood) (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) Reviews

  • Tamar...playing hooky for a few hours today

    I have little time to read and no time to write now...but I can find enough time to say that this author writes beautifully with much atmosphere and some innocence even where cruel and ugly behavior prevails. Written in the days when people bought magazines, religiously following serial stories (do magazines still do that? I haven't read a magazine in at least 40 years!). You definitely get a cliffhanger, signaling the end of the installment until the next week. These novellas are in the public domain, I downloaded all three from the internet but have only read Winona so far. Winona can be found on Gutenberg Project.

  • Annette Boehm

    These three novels were an interesting read for me, both as historical documents / cultural artifacts and as entertaining stories. Hopkins believed in teaching her African American readership through serialized stories, - as a result, these novels try to entertain and educate at the same time. The plot-lines are at times not unlike those of soap operas - but I don't want to spoil the surprises, so I'll leave it at that.
    For an in-depth discussion of each of the novels, visit my book blog here:
    https://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2...

  • Sarah Hermes Griesbach

    She wrote these as serialized short stand alone chapters in a magazine for African Americans. The rhythm of the chapters can be a little bit fuddy as there is always a great climax and a cliffhanger. Each novel is chock full of insight into the incredibly rich and complicated layers of race and racism in post Civil War America.

    I first read “Hagar and her Daughter” in one sitting - a 1900 story of a “great and noble” white liberal from Massachusetts writing papers about the horrors of post-Civil War racism while at Harvard, acting as a philanthropist to black universities, newspapers and politicians yet personally harboring destructive racist ideas of purity that destroy him. It is such a telling work of fiction.

    Each unveils a different angle of experiences within a time both so different and not all different from our own.

  • Willow

    This was pretty damn interesting collection. Check this out to see some really shocking racial issues as someone in the 19th century would have viewed and understood them.

  • Brent

    Hagar's Daughter is an interesting, late 19th/early 20th century version of detective fiction.

  • Kishanna Laurie

    I still think about "Of One Blood" and I read this in college [undergrad:], memorable.

  • E_h

    (I only read Winona and Of One Blood)