"Between the Lines" identifies nineteenth century literary transnationalism as a method of reading poetic texts. It examines the poetic representations of slavery and freedom by women poets of African descent in "the Americas." It posits the space "between the lines" of the text and of national bodies, as a liminal space in which the histories of African descendants both diverge and intersect. Through a comparative analysis of three "afrodescendente " poets—Brazilian poet Auta de Souza, Cuban poet Cristina Ayala, and North American poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—this dissertation contends that the thematic and typological commonalities in their work demonstrate a problematic interdependence of the opposing concepts of slavery and freedom during the New World "abolition eras." A parallel to this tension between slavery and freedom appears at the level of the poetic line and, furthermore, constitutes a form of trans-hemispheric exchange.

Following an introductory chapter that establishes the significance of race, ancestry, and geography to the project, and that examines transnationalism both as a theme and method of comparative reading in a number of modern and contemporary poets, the body chapters consist of close readings of select works by Auta, Ayala and Harper. Chapter one examines Harper's use of transnational black icons to represent struggles for freedom tragically complicated by either racial or colonial oppression. Chapter two examines Ayala and Harper's use of biblical typology and allusion to poetically interpret the history of slavery as a predicament for the contemporary nation. Chapter three examines the interdependent constructions of slavery and freedom in Harper and Ayala's poetic inquiries into the problem of racial uplift, gender identity, and national freedom in Cuba and the United States. Chapter four examines Auta de Souza's meditation on freedom and slavery as mediated by death and her use of the figure of the slave to assert female identity. The dissertation's conclusion further discusses transnational, comparative literary studies as a mode of reading that incorporates structuralist and historicist hermeneutical approaches and explores the implications of such readings for framing a literature of African descendants in the Americas.