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Author: William W. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Author: William W. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book Here
Book Description
Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Author: Patrice D. Rankine
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299220036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca. Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674035720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1188
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Book Description
The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.
Author: Tessa Roynon
Publisher: BAAS Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781474434041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book is an invaluable survey of the allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture in the work of seven major modern American novelists: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Marilynne Robinson.
Author: John Levi Barnard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190663596
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."
Author: Eric Ashley Hairston
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572339845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In The Ebony Column, Eric Ashley Hairston begins a new thread in the ongoing conversation about the influence of Greek and Roman antiquity on U.S. civilization and education. While that discussion has yielded many exceptional insights into antiquity and the American experience, it has so regularly elided the African American component that all classical influence on black writing and thought seems to vanish. That omission, Hairston contends, is disturbing not least because of its longevity— from an early period of overt stereotyping and institutionalized racism right up to the contemporary and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan and enlightened era. Challenging and correcting that persistent shortsightedness, Hairston examines several prominent black writers’ and scholars’ deep investment in the classics as individuals, as well as the broader cultural investment in the classics and the values of the ancient world. Beginning with the late-eighteenth-century verse of Phillis Wheatley, whose classically inspired poems functioned as a kind of Trojan horse to defeat white oppression, Hairston goes on to consider the oratory of Frederick Douglass, whose rhetoric and ideas of virtue were much influenced by Cicero, and the writings of educator Anna Julia Cooper, whose classical training was a key source of her vibrant feminism. Finally, he offers a fresh examination of W. E. B. DuBois’s seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and its debt to antiquity, which volumes of commentary have largely overlooked. The first book to appear in a new series, Classicism in American Culture, The Ebony Column passionately demonstrates how the myths, cultures, and ideals of antiquity helped African Americans reconceptualize their role in a Euro-American world determined to make them mere economic commodities and emblems of moral and intellectual decay. To figures such as Wheatley, Douglass, Cooper, and DuBois, classical literature offered striking moral, intellectual, and philosophical alternatives to a viciously exclusionary vision of humanity, Africanity, the life of the citizen, and the life of the mind.
Author: Derrick P. Alridge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor
Author: Tessa Roynon
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199698686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
In this volume, Roynon explores Toni Morrison's widespread engagement with ancient Greek and Roman tradition. Combining original and detailed close readings with broader theoretical discussions, she argues that classicism is fundamental to the transformative critique of American culture that Morrison's work effects.
Author: Margaret Malamud
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786720280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
A new wave of research in black classicism has emerged in the 21st century that explores the role played by the classics in the larger cultural traditions of black America, Africa and the Caribbean. Addressing a gap in this scholarship, Margaret Malamud investigates why and how advocates for abolition and black civil rights (both black and white) deployed their knowledge of classical literature and history in their struggle for black liberty and equality in the United States. African Americans boldly staked their own claims to the classical world: they deployed texts, ideas and images of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt in order to establish their authority in debates about slavery, race, politics and education. A central argument of this book is that knowledge and deployment of Classics was a powerful weapon and tool for resistance-as improbable as that might seem now-when wielded by black and white activists committed to the abolition of slavery and the end of the social and economic oppression of free blacks. The book significantly expands our understanding of both black history and classical reception in the United States.
Author: Nicholas Kenyon
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300260601
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
Nicholas Kenyon explores the enduring appeal of the classical canon at a moment when we can access all music—across time and cultures Immersed in music for much of his life as writer, broadcaster and concert presenter, former director of the BBC Proms, Nicholas Kenyon has long championed an astonishingly wide range of composers and performers. Now, as we think about culture in fresh ways, Kenyon revisits the stories that make up the classical tradition and foregrounds those which are too often overlooked. This inclusive, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic guide highlights the achievements of the women and men, amateurs and professionals, who bring music to life. Taking us from pianist Myra Hess’s performance in London during the Blitz, to John Adams’s composition of a piece for mourners after New York’s 9/11 attacks, to Italian opera singers singing from their balconies amidst the 2020 pandemic, Kenyon shows that no matter how great the crisis, music has the power to bring us together. His personal, celebratory account transforms our understanding of how classical music is made—and shows us why it is more relevant than ever.
