Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage by Sarah E. Chinn (review)

Abstract

moment on Wheatley. His analysis of that pivotal time when she refused resettlement highlights her sentimentalism, her Revolutionary republicanism, her desire to profit from her works, and her determination to be a free woman. That said, his readings of her poems do not consider the radical creativity that Wheatley as a young black woman, enslaved then free, found possible in evangelical Calvinist and Revolutionary republican contexts.