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

| Top | Selected Bibliography

Ammons, Elizabeth. "Afterword: Winona, Bakhtin, and Hopkins in the Twenty first Century." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 211-19.

Berg, Allison. "Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces." Studies in American Fiction 24.2 (Autm 1996): 131-50.

Brooks, Kristina. "New Woman, Fallen Woman: The Crisis of Reputation in Turn of Century Novels by Pauline Hopkins and Edith Wharton." Legacy 13.2 (1996): 91-112.

- - -. "Mammies, Bucks, and Wenches: Minstrelsy, Racial Pornography, and Racial Politics in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 119-57.

- - -. "Transgressing the Boundaries of Identity: Racial Pornography, Fallen Women, and Ethnic Others in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Edith Wharton." DAI 56.9 (Mar 1996): 3578A. DA9602494.

Brown, Lois A. "Essential Histories/Determined Identities: Images of Race and Origin in the Works of Pauline Hopkins." DAI 54.6 (Dec 1993): 2148A DAI No.: DA9329279.

- - -. "'To Allow No Tragic End': Defensive Postures in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 50-70.

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.

Carroll, Traci R. "Subjects of Consumption: Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers." DAI 53.11 (May 1993): 3905A. DA9309344.

Doreski, C. K. "Inherited Rhetoric and Authentic History: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American Magazine." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 71-97.

Gillman, Susan. "Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African American Revisions of Nineteenth Century Sciences." American Literary History 8.1 (Sprg 1996): 57-82.

Gruesser, John C. "Taking Liberties: Pauline Hopkins's Recasting of the Creole Rebellion." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 98-118.

Horvitz, Deborah. "Hysteria and Trauma in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood; Or,the Hidden Self." African american review 33.2 (Sumr 1999): 245-61.

Kassanoff, Jennie A. "'Fate Has Linked Us Together': Blood, Gender, and the Politics of the Representation in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 158-81.

McCann, Sean. "'Bonds of Brotherhood': Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama." ELH 64.3 (Fall 1997): 789-822.

McCullough, Kate. "Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 21-49.

Otten, Thomas J. "Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race." ELH 59.1 (Sprg 1992): 227-56.

| Top | Pamplin, Claire. "'Race' and Identity in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter." Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901. ED. Sharon M. Harris. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995. 169-83.

Patterson, Martha H. "'Survival of the Best Fitted': The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston." DAI 57.5 (Nov 1996): 2041A. DA9629704

Peterson, Carla L. "Unsettled Frontiers: Race, History, and Romance in Pauline Hopkin's 'Contending Forces.'" Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 177-96.

Rorhbach, Augusta. "To Be Continued: Double Identity, Multiplicity and Anti-Genealogy as Narrative Strategies in Pauline Hopkins' Magazine Fiction." Callaloo 22.2 (Sprg 1999): 483-499.

Schrager, Cynthia D. "Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 182-209.

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

- - -. "Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion Into Obscurity." Phylon 33 (1972): 22-26.

Somerville, Siobhan. "Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces." American Literature 69.1 (Mar 1997): 139-66.

Tate, Claudia. "Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother." Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 53-66.

- - -. "Allegories of Black Female Desire: Or, Rereading Nineteenth Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority." Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 98-126.

| Top | 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: Late Nineteenth Century - Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/hopkins.html (provide page date or date of your login).  

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