SOURCE: "Doers of the Word, The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper," in Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 131-53.

Foster is a noted literary historian in the area of African-American literature. She is the author of Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative; the editor of A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Reader and Minnie's Sacrifice; Sowing and Reaping; Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper; and the coeditor of The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature. In the following excerpt, Foster describes the themes and poetic techniques that Harper used in the poetry she wrote during the Reconstruction Era. Foster points out the degree to which Harper makes statements applicable to contemporaneous issues of race and sex, incorporates her own experiences into her poetry, and adheres to the literary aesthetics...