Race, Reading, and Writing in the Early American South, 1700-1810

FAIN: FT-51856-03

Catherine Kerrison
Villanova University (Villanova, PA 19085-1478)

I seek NEH support to complete the last chapter of my book manuscript which is the first book-length study of the intellectual lives of eighteenth-century southern women. The book examines the influence of advice literature, popular in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world, on elite white southern women. The project for which I seek support is the culminating chapter and poses the crucial questions: What did it mean for these women to read this conduct-of-life advice, generated in England, within a plantation slave society? How did the context of their society, whose patriarchal gender relations were inextricably bound up with race, shape their understandings of what they read?

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