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The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that "the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism." In recent decades, however, Wheatley's work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers. The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatley's multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatley's references to Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatley's use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools. Engaging Wheatley's multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. They ponder Wheatley's verse within the framework of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century "salon culture," and the theoretics of imagination. Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatley's literary achievement and present Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I: Examining New Manifestations of Classicism in the Poetics of Phillis Wheatley -- Phillis Wheatley's Dido: An Analysis of "An Hymn to Humanity. To S.P.G. Esq." -- I Remember Mama: Honoring the Goddess-Mother While Denouncing the Slaveowner-God in Phillis Wheatley's Poetry -- The Interaction of the Classical Traditions of Literature and Politics in the Work of Phillis Wheatley -- The Trojan Horse: Classics, Memory, Transformation, and Afric Ambition in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral -- Empowerment through Classicism in Phillis Wheatley's "Ode to Neptune" -- Phillis Wheatley's Use of the Georgic -- Part II: Placing Phillis Wheatley in Newly AppliedHistorical Contexts -- Works of Wonder, Wondering Eyes, and the Wondrous Poet: The Use of Wonder in Phillis Wheatley's Marvelous Poetics -- Queering Phillis Wheatley -- Marketing a Sable Muse: Phillis Wheatley and the Antebellum Press -- Phillis Wheatley: The Consensual Blackness of Early African American Writing -- The Pan-African and Puritan Dimensions of Phillis Wheatley's Poems and Letters -- An Untangled Web: Mapping Phillis Wheatley's Network of Support in America and Great Britain -- Phillis Wheatley's Theoretics of the Imagination: An Untold Chapter in the History of Early American Literary Aesthetics -- To "pursue th' unbodied mind": Phillis Wheatley and the Raced Bod yin Early America -- Contributors -- Index.
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