Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-195) and index.
Contents
In the beginning, a photograph -- Introduction: the personal become the project -- 1. "To woman...I say depart!" ; The plantation literary tradition, the emergent anti-uncle Tom novel, and gender -- 2. Sanctified by wealth and whiteness ; Mother-saviors--and not-- in the urban North -- 3. Justified by mother's milk ; Mammies and mistress figures in proslavery fiction's plantation south -- 4. The background that belies the myth ; The historical record that helps explain the preponderance of nonslaveholding proslavery women authors -- 5. Mothering the other; othering the mother ; An African American woman novelist battles slavery and Uncle Tom -- 6. Still playing with fire ; Perpetuation and refutation of the plantation romance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels by women.
