Primary Works

Contending forces: a romance illustrative of Negro life North and South, 1900; Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Class Prejudice, 1902; Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, 1902; Of One Blood, or, the Hidden Self, 1903; Founder & Editor, Colored American Magazine; her story, "A Dash for Liberty," is an adaptation of the Creole rebellion (the subect of Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave whose protagonist in Madison Washington; Hopkins renames the protagonist, Madison Monroe; for a discussion, see John Grusser's article, listed below).

Contending forces: a romance illustrative of Negro life North and South ( 1900). NY: Oxford UP, 1988. PS1999 .H4226 C66

The magazine novels of Pauline Hopkins. NY: Oxford UP, 1988. PS1999 .H4226 A6

Selected Bibliography 1980-Present

Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. NY: Garland, 1998.

Bergman, Jill. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.

Brown, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008.

Campbell, Jane. Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986.

Carby, Hazel. Recostructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. NY: Oxford UP, 1987.

Dworkin, Ira. ed. Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006.

Gabler-Hover, Janet. Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000.

Gruesser, John C. ed. The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

Knight, Alisha. Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African-American Writer's (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2012.

Mitchell, Verner D. Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, a Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2011.

Shockley, Ann A. Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

Wallinger, Hanna. Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005.

West, Elizabeth J. African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011.

Williams, Andreá N. Dividing Lines: Class, Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012.

Study Questions

1. Explore how "Ma Smith's Lodging-House--Concluded" delineates educated from uneducated characters. Why do you suppose such distinctions were important to Hopkins's novel? How do you react to the use of black English, or black dialect, as it is sometimes called? Is it a realistic device, or does it demean the speaker?

2. What did you learn from "The Sewing Circle" about African-Americans during Hopkins's day? What does Hopkins teach her audience about American history?

3. Could a novel similar to Contending Forces be written today? Explore what differences you might expect.

4. Might there be other African-American writers of Hopkins's time whose work has been lost, writers we have not yet rediscovered? Why might their works have been lost?

5. How do you account for the resurgence of interest in early African-American women writers?

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 6: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:
http://www.paulreuben.website/pal/chap6/hopkins.html (provide page date or date of your login).  

| Top |