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Harriet E. Adams Wilson is thought to be the very first Afro-American woman to have published a novel in English. In a period in which racial "firsts" have been heralded loudly and widely, as talismans drawn out to counter racist aspersions cast upon Afro-American culture as a whole, the rediscovery of Harriet Wilson's text and the authentication of her gender and racial identity have pushed back the starting point for fiction by Afro-American women from 1892 to 1859. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. By "Our Nig." (1859) is a major example of genre fusion created by the writer's appropriation of a black, masculine, literary model (the slave narrative) and a white, female one (the sentimental novel). The result is a synthesis at once peculiarly black and female. The originality Wilson displays in fashioning a novelistic romance out of her autobiography insures her place not only as the first black woman novelist but also as one of the first major innovators of American fictional narrative form.
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