We might notice the textual production which occurs on two levels in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl--that of the primary writer, Jacobs, who is telling her story to a nineteenth-century northern, white, female audience, and that of Jean Fagin Yellin, the editor who has brought authentication and critical acclaim to this long-neglected text. Students notice that Jacobs uses the styles of both "Garrisonian absolitionism" as well as that of romance fiction as pointed out by Yellin in the "Introduction" (xxi), while Yellin employs the language and conventions of literary and historical criticism, adding a foreword about her discovery of the material documenting the text's authenticity and an appendix of historical documents such as letters between Harriet Jacobs and the original editor, Lydia Maria Child.

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