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- Title
"ON Death's Domain Intent I Fix My Eyes": Text, Context, and Subtext in the Elegies of Phillis Wheatley.
- Authors
Bly, Antonio T.
- Abstract
Phillis Wheatley's modern critics are divided. Some, for example, have characterized the slave-poet's work as examples of a colonized mind. Other scholars, however, have observed in her writings an appropriation of Western traditions to subtly critique slavery, remember her native Africa, and contemplate freedom. In none of these analyses have scholars begun to consider her elegies. Indeed, missing in modern studies of Wheatley's work is a critical examination of how Wheatley manipulated typography as a literary device to transform the literal meanings of her funerary poems: "Sass." An aesthetic adopted by peoples of Africa or of African descent in response to racial prejudice, Sass represents an expression of agency that is at once deferential and defiant, polite and contrarian. In the essay that follows, Wheatley's Sass, a unique part of the poet's elegiac style, is explored.
- Subjects
WHEATLEY, Phillis, 1753-1784; SASS (Poem); AFRICAN American poets; AFRICAN American poetry; ENSLAVED African Americans; AMERICAN literature; ENSLAVED persons' writings; LITERARY criticism; POETRY (Literary form); REVOLUTIONARY (Literary period); 19TH century (Literary period); 18TH century (Literary period)
- Publication
Early American Literature, 2018, Vol 53, Issue 2, p317
- ISSN
0012-8163
- Publication type
Poetry Review
- DOI
10.1353/eal.2018.0040