From Africa to America -- Wheatley as beginning -- African and Christian encounters in early Black women's writings -- Africa silenced: Christianity's persistent voice in early Black women's novels -- Christianity and a reawakening Africanity: Black spirituality in the post-reconstruction novels of Frances E.W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins -- Rethinking religiosity in the wake of modernity: transformations of Christian idealisms in the novels of Jessie Fauset -- Transformed religiosities: Africanity and Christianity in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's gourd vine and Their eyes were watching God
Summary
African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces the beginnings and transformations of African spirituality in African American women's literature, and culminates with an examination of its return to center stage in the fiction of black Renaissance writers, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. It is distinct in its employment of a diachronic lens to examine specific African spiritual elements that can be traced from early to modern black women's fiction
