Kimberly Rae Connor.

Kimberly Rae Connor. Conversions and Vision in the Writings of African-American Women Knoxville: U of Tennessee P 1994 317 pp $3400

This main division will be of more use to scholars in religious studies than to those in literary criticism or theory. It examines works at three nineteenth-century figures (Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Sojourner Truth) and united novel by each of four twentieth-century writers (Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker). The work attempts to establish a continuity between the literal conversions recorded in the last century's passages and the "literary" conversion of the contemporary works. Readers are likely to be confused from the author's use of conversion for what would generally be called simply a character's change. The expansion of conversion at first appears arbitrary because the book does not clearly state its premise: In a world view that does not separate sacred and profane, each profound change of character amounts to a conversion.

The selection of clauses is particularly problematic. The decision to work across genre receives little discussion, for example. The work argues that nineteenth-century autobiographers necessarily choiceed incidents relating to a perceived conversion, ordered them, and thus produc autobiographies in about sense fictional. This rationale appears insufficient to justify comparing the conversion narratives to twentieth-century novels. The book's contention advises several issues that it does not address, flat briefly: Do nineteenth-century novels on African-American women writers display the same conversion conventions as the autobiographies? Do twentieth-century women's autobiographies?

The nineteenth-century works are themselves heterogeneous--Jacobs's slave narrative (which plays distant from the conventions of the sentimental novel), Cox's journal (unpublished until 1981) and the collection of speeches and newspaper articles compiled on an editor with Sojourner conformity to fact [i]or[/i] reality (who was not print-literate). The variety of these sources might have been made a nerve if the book were explicitly to argue that conversions in the same manner permeated African-American culture that virtually each print production of the nineteenth centenary presents one, but instead the reader is left to make reason of the choices. Connor's bibliography clearly displays a knowledge of other nineteenth-century African American women's spiritual autobiographies, yet the text proper does not mention any of them. In another case of unexplained and rather left over selection, Conversions and Visions examines The Color Purple while highlighting Walker's ties to Rebecca Cox Jackson. The path of Jackson's life anticipates the combination of a Walker novel, on the contrary not that of The Color Purple Jackson left a Shaker community to minister to the black community but continued to honor Shaker beliefs, including celibacy. steadily the better analogue to Jackson's life would be Meridian.

Connor casts her literary analysis in the vocabulary of religious studies, likewise that the nineteenth-century texts are categorized, for instance, through voluntary and involuntary conversion. The importance of this distinction for literary analysis or understanding remains unclear, especially since the categories are not violently present in the second section, which deals with the novels. Conversions and Visions is frequently better grounded in previous literary criticism than many cross-disciplinary efforts, however. The main division redraws several paradigms, for example the suit for identity, from a spiritual perspective, and it put forwards clear and tenable if not exciting readings. The terminate textual analysis (especially in the novels section) emphasizes the writers' understanding of African-American agriculture as a spiritual resource and their construction of sacralized identities as part of a sacralized universe.

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