History Homework Help

https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

In no less than 250 words, respond to the following prompt:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl did not receive a  great deal of critical attention until the late twentieth century,  mostly because modern scholars had doubts about its authenticity and the  conditions of its authorship. For many years, the book was understood  to be a novel written in the guise of a slave narrative or an  embellished slave autobiography ghost-written by a white author. Critics  often assumed that Lydia Maria Child had composed the narrative, even  though she insists in her introduction that her editorial work was  limited to “condensa- tion and orderly arrangement.” Through extensive  research, Jean Fagan Yellin finally offered conclusive proof of Jacobs’s  authorship of Incidents and the authenticity of the events described in  the text. Yellin’s 1981 edition of Jacobs’s work alerted scholars to  its importance and transformed its position within the canon. Consider  why Jacobs’s authorship was questioned for so long. Why would scholars  have found it so difficult to believe that a black woman raised in  slavery could have written this book? What qualities make the narrative  seem fictional?