Ann Petry's Short Fiction

Ann Petry's Short Fiction PDF Author: Hazel A. Ervin
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This collection of critical essays is the first work to examine the short stories of Ann Petry, a noted African American writer. While best known for her best-selling debut novel, The Street, the focus of this text is her equally important, but less familiar, volume of short stories Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Within Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines, from literary studies to philosophy, analyze and comment on stories such as Mother Africa, In Darkness and Confusion, and The Witness. Organized into three parts, the first section provides an overview of Petry's short fiction from different theoretical perspectives. In the following two segments, essays are arranged in chronological order, beginning with Petry's work from the 1940s. Contributors discuss her portrayal of characters and conflict as well as thematic threads that run through Petry's work. Taken together, these 14 essays constitute an invaluable companion to Petry's work. This illuminating collection will interest scholars of literature, history, and culture, as well as anyone interested in the fiction of Ann Petry.

Ann Petry's Short Fiction

Ann Petry's Short Fiction PDF Author: Hazel A. Ervin
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of critical essays is the first work to examine the short stories of Ann Petry, a noted African American writer. While best known for her best-selling debut novel, The Street, the focus of this text is her equally important, but less familiar, volume of short stories Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Within Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines, from literary studies to philosophy, analyze and comment on stories such as Mother Africa, In Darkness and Confusion, and The Witness. Organized into three parts, the first section provides an overview of Petry's short fiction from different theoretical perspectives. In the following two segments, essays are arranged in chronological order, beginning with Petry's work from the 1940s. Contributors discuss her portrayal of characters and conflict as well as thematic threads that run through Petry's work. Taken together, these 14 essays constitute an invaluable companion to Petry's work. This illuminating collection will interest scholars of literature, history, and culture, as well as anyone interested in the fiction of Ann Petry.

The Street

The Street PDF Author: Ann Petry
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547525346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TAYARI JONES “How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? I am tempted to describe Petry as a magician for the many ways that The Street amazes, but this description cheapens her talent . . . Petry is a gifted artist.” — Tayari Jones, from the Introduction The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry PDF Author: Keith Clark
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In his in-depth analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908--1997), Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a major mid-twentieth-century African American author and the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest." He focuses on her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. He explores, for example, Petry's use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in the stories "The Bones of Louella Brown" and "The Witness." Petry's overlooked second novel, Country Place -- set in a deceptively serene Connecticut hamlet -- camouflages a world as nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors -- some socially sanctioned, others taboo -- in her unheralded masterpiece The Narrows and her widely anthologized short story "Like a Winding Sheet." Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry analyzes Petry's unique concerns and agile techniques, situating her among more celebrated male contemporary writers.

The Narrows

The Narrows PDF Author: Ann Petry
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar due to the lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. Drinking in a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he learns that she is white. Unbeknownst to him, “Camilo” (actually Camilla Treadway Sheffield) is a wealthy married woman who has crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve the tedium of her life. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilla draw each other into furtive encounters that violate the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their own town and times. As The Narrows sweeps ahead to its shattering denouement, Petry shines a harsh yet richly truthful light on the deforming harm that race and class wreak on human lives. In a fascinating introduction to this new edition, Keith Clark discusses the prescience with which Petry chronicled the ways tabloid journalism, smug elitism, and mob mentality distort and demonize African American men.

The Black Poets

The Black Poets PDF Author: Dudley Randall
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553275631
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall

At Home Inside

At Home Inside PDF Author: Elisabeth Petry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604735895
Category : African American authors
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Ann Petry (1908-1997) was a prominent writer during a period in which few black writers were published with regularity in America. Her novels "The Street," "Country Place," and "The Narrows," along with a collection of short stories and various essays and works of nonfiction, give voice to black experience outside of the traditional strains of poverty and black nationalism. "At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry" sifts the myriad contradictions of Ann Petry's life from a daughter's vantage. Ann Petry hoarded antiques but destroyed many of her journals. She wrote, but, failing to publish for years, she used her imagination to design and sew clothes, to bake, and to garden. When fame finally came, Ann Petry did not enjoy the travel it brought. Though she suffered phobias and anxieties all her life, she did not avoid the obligations of literary success until late in her career. Ann Petry applied her formidable skills to stories she told about herself and her family, and the corrections Elisabeth Petry makes to her mother's inventions will prove invaluable. Talking about her life publicly, Ann Petry acknowledged six different birth dates. She hid her first marriage, and even represented her father, Peter C. Lane, Jr., as a potential killer. Mining Petry's journals Elisabeth Petry creates part biography, part love letter, and part sounding of her mother's genius and luminescent personality. Elisabeth Petry is a freelance writer with a juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut, and is the editor of "Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters" (University Press of Mississippi).

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry PDF Author: Keith Clark
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This welcome study delivers a long-overdue analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908–1997), a major mid-twentieth-century African American author. Primarily known as the sole female member of the “Wright School of Social Protest,” Petry has been most recognized for her 1946 novel The Street, about a woman’s struggle to raise her son in a hardscrabble Harlem neighborhood. Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a sort of literary descendent of Richard Wright to acclaim her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry’s three novels and collection of short stories. Clark explores, for example, Petry’s use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He also identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in her startling depictions of race, class, gender construction, and sexual identity in the stories “The Bones of Louella Brown” and “The Witness.” Petry’s overlooked second novel, Country Place—set in a deceptively serene, bucolic Connecticut hamlet—camouflages a world as palsied and nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry’s writing, Clark also assesses the writer’s representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors—some socially sanctioned, others transgressive and taboo—in her unheralded masterpiece, The Narrows, and her widely anthologized short story, “Like a Winding Sheet.” Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry foregrounds and analyzes Petry’s unique concerns and agile techniques, re-introducing and situating her among more celebrated male contemporaries.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman PDF Author: Ann Petry
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504019865
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
A New York Times Outstanding Book for young adult readers, this biography of the famed Underground Railroad abolitionist is a lesson in valor and justice. Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman knew the thirst for freedom. Inspired by rumors of an “underground railroad” that carried slaves to liberation, she dreamed of escaping the nightmarish existence of the Southern plantations and choosing a life of her own making. But after she finally did escape, Tubman made a decision born of profound courage and moral conviction: to go back and help those she’d left behind. As an activist on the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses running from South to North and eventually into Canada, Tubman delivered more than three hundred souls to freedom. She became an insidious threat to the Southern establishment—and a symbol of hope to slaves everywhere. In this “well-written and moving life of the ‘Moses of her people’’’ (The Horn Book), an acclaimed author makes vivid and accessible the life of a national hero, soon to be immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill. This intimate portrait follows Tubman on her journey from bondage to freedom, from childhood to the frontlines of the abolition movement and even the Civil War. In addition to being named a New York Times Outstanding Book, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad was also selected as an American Library Association Notable Book.

Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction

Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction PDF Author: Alice Hall Petry
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780817305475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction offers the first comprehensive study of the four collections of short stories that F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) prepared for publication during his lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935). These authorized collections--which include works from the entire range of Fitzgerald's career, from his undergraduate days at Princeton to his final contributions to Esquire magazine--provide an ideal overview of his development as a short story writer. Originally published in 1989, this volume draws upon Fitzgerald's copious personal correspondence, biographical studies, and all available criticism, and analyzes how Fitzgerald perceived his achievements as a writer of short fiction from both artistic and commercial standpoints. Petry pays close attention to the individual stories, exploring how Fitzgerald's growing technical expertise and the evolution of his themes reflect changes in his personal life.

The Drugstore Cat

The Drugstore Cat PDF Author: Ann Petry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cats
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description