Phillis Wheatley Peters's Poetic Worlds: Peters’s Manuscript Poetry and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Coteries

FAIN: FEL-288837-23

Wendy R. Roberts
SUNY Research Foundation, Albany (Albany, NY 12222-0001)

Transcription of archival documents and writing a book on Phillis Wheatley Peters’s (c. 1753-1784) poetry production in the context of transatlantic manuscript culture. 

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poetic Worlds is the first book to reveal Peters’s extensive manuscript presence and its far-reaching impact on American literature and history by mobilizing extensive new research, including new poems by Peters, new poems written to Peters, and new coteries that circulated her poems. While previous studies of Peters (considered the mother of African American literature) focused almost exclusively on the meaning of her poems within the expanding medium of print, this book shows how Peters maneuvered through the thriving manuscript cultures of the eighteenth century while actively altering the possibilities for black freedom within the manuscript networks she purposefully cultivated. In so doing, it centers methods developed in Black studies for the recovery of black lives within a predominantly white archive in order to deepen our understanding of Peters and the entwined subjects of political freedom and aesthetics in the history of American poetry.