News Releases

Book on African-American Slave Narrative Edited by NJCU Professor Published by Cambridge University Press

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, a book edited by Dr. Audrey A. Fisch, a professor of English and elementary and secondary education at New Jersey City University, has been published by Cambridge University Press.

The Cambridge Companion examines the relation of the slave narrative, which has emerged as a fundamental genre within literary studies, to transatlantic abolitionism, such British and American literary traditions as captivity narratives, autobiography, and sentimental literature, and the larger African-American literary tradition. The volume also explores the history of the genre, including its rediscovery and authentication, subsequent critical reception, and continued importance to modern authors. Attention is paid both to well-known and lesser-known slave narratives.

Among the features of the 290-page book are an index; an extensive chronology that begins with the Spanish importation of slaves into the Caribbean in 1510 and ends in 2004 when Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World; a guide to further reading; and an introduction by Dr. Fisch.

The book is divided into four parts: “The Slave Narrative and Transnational Abolitionism,” “The Slave Narrative and Anglo-American Literary Traditions,” “The Slave Narrative and the African-American Literary Tradition,” and “The Slave Narrative and the Politics of Knowledge.”

The book’s 14 contributors represent a wide range of scholarship, including history, English, African-American Studies, American literature, and American studies, and hail from such institutions as West Virginia University, Brown University, City University of New York, University of the West of England, Princeton University, Harvard University, and California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Fisch, who is currently working on the book, Frankenstein: Icon of Western Culture, is the author of American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture and the co-editor of The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein.

Articles by Dr. Fisch have most recently been published in Pedagogy, The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, Feminist Teacher, Victorian Literature and Culture, Planned Parenthood, and The New York Times, and at Salon.com. Her work has also been published in NJCU’s Women on Campus and The Academic Forum.

A member of the NJCU faculty since 1998 and coordinator of its Secondary English Education Program since 2001, Dr. Fisch has also served as coordinator of the institution’s Women’s Studies Program. She has also taught at Raritan County College and Rutgers University.

Dr. Fisch holds both a Ph.D. and an M.A. in English from Rutgers University, and a B.A. in English and mathematics from Amherst College.

News releases by Ellen Wayman-Gordon, and Kelly Resch, Office of Public Information.