Mythic Black Fiction

Mythic Black Fiction PDF Author: Jane Campbell
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870495939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description

Mythic Black Fiction

Mythic Black Fiction PDF Author: Jane Campbell
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870495939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description


Writing Tricksters

Writing Tricksters PDF Author: Jeanne Rosier Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520206564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Brilliant. Smith shows us how to bridge and link authors into an understanding of contemporary American literature that occupies shared ground, yet she insists on the imperative of educating ourselves in many U.S. traditions. The result is a book that meets the extremely difficult challenge of working multiculturally without either erasing or overdetermining difference. This discussion will have applications well beyond the group of authors discussed here."--Elizabeth Ammons, coeditor of Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective "Transcultural and thoroughly documented, this study of contemporary ethnic texts by women is comparative in the most scholarly sense. No reader of modern American fiction could argue against its trickster premises: the power to laugh at old worlds, and invent new ones."--Kenneth Lincoln, author of Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America "Communicates keen insights on fictional techniques and cultural themes in clear, elegant and jargon-free language. I believe that this study will serve as an excellent model for future multicultural literary criticism."--Bonnie TuSmith, author of All My Relatives "Highly accessible to a diverse audience, Writing Tricksters forces readers to examine the power of storytelling traditions to cultural and individual survival. Smith's cross-cultural discussion of the trickster is right on the cusp of an important, evolving analytical direction."--Alanna Kathleen Brown, Montana State University "Few scholars have attempted to find the lines of contact and connection between ethnic writers. Writing Tricksters is fresh and original, an important addition to the growing corpus of truly multicultural critical texts."--Joseph Skerrett, coeditor of Memory, Narrative, and Identity

Black Moses

Black Moses PDF Author: Alain Mabanckou
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 178283267X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the orphanage's corrupt director. So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home first with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and then among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles? Vivid, exuberant and heartwarming, Black Moses is a vital new extension of Alain Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

The Coupling Convention : Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

The Coupling Convention : Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction PDF Author: Ann duCille Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Wesleyan University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195359119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does the tradition of marriage mean for people who have historically been deprived of its legal status? Generally thought of as a convention of the white middle class, the marriage plot has received little attention from critics of African-American literature. In this study, Ann duCille uses texts such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to demonstrate that the African-American novel, like its European and Anglo-American counterparts, has developed around the marriage plot--what she calls "the coupling convention." Exploring the relationship between racial ideology and literary and social conventions, duCille uses the coupling convention to trace the historical development of the African-American women's novel. She demonstrates the ways in which black women appropriated this novelistic device as a means of expressing and reclaiming their own identity. More than just a study of the marriage tradition in black women's fiction, however, The Coupling Convention takes up and takes on many different meanings of tradition. It challenges the notion of a single black literary tradition, or of a single black feminist literary canon grounded in specifically black female language and experience, as it explores the ways in which white and black, male and female, mainstream and marginalized "traditions" and canons have influenced and cross-fertilized each other. Much more than a period study, The Coupling Convention spans the period from 1853 to 1948, addressing the vital questions of gender, subjectivity, race, and the canon that inform literary study today. In this original work, duCille offers a new paradigm for reading black women's fiction.

Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Esther L. Jones
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137514698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
Speculative fiction often shows the complicated and rather fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women. Through prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, Jones highlights how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sicknesses in connection to race and gender.

All Stories Are True

All Stories Are True PDF Author: Tracie Church Guzzio
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. Guzzio argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman's work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman's personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman remains under-studied. Of particular value is Guzzio's analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman's challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, and his allowing past, present, and future time to remain fluid in the narratives, Guzzio finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

Echo Tree

Echo Tree PDF Author: Henry Dumas
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566896134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America. Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America’s history of slavery and systemic racism.

Black Fascisms

Black Fascisms PDF Author: Mark Christian Thompson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813926711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this provocative new book, Mark Christian Thompson addresses the startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of African American political resistance. Thompson surveys the work and thought of several authors and asserts that their sometimes positive reaction to generic European fascism, and its transformation into black fascism, is crucial to any understanding of Depression-era African American literary culture. The book considers the high regard that "Back to Africa" advocate Marcus Garvey expressed for fascist dictators and explores the common ground he shared with George Schuyler and Claude McKay, writers with whom Garvey is generally thought to be at odds. Thompson reveals how fascism informed a rejection of Marxism by McKay--as well as by Arna Bontemps, whose Drums at Dusk depicts communism as antithetical to any black revolution. A similarly authoritarian stance is examined in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, where the striving for a fascist sovereignty presents itself as highly critical of Nazism while nonetheless sharing many of its tenets. The book concludes with an investigation of Richard Wright's The Outsider and its murderous protagonist, Cross Damon, who articulates fascist drives already present, if latent, in Native Son's Bigger Thomas. Unencumbered by the historical or biblical references of the earlier work, Damon personifies the essence of black fascism. Taking on a subject generally ignored or denied in African American cultural and literary studies, Black Fascisms seeks not only to question the prominence of the Left in the political thought of a generation of writers but to change how we view African American literature in general. Encompassing political theory, cultural studies, critical theory, and historicism, the book will challenge readers in numerous fields, providing a new model for thinking about the political and transnational in African American culture and shedding new light on our understanding of fascism between the wars.

Toni Morrison's Fiction

Toni Morrison's Fiction PDF Author: David L. Middleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317954297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of contemporary criticism explores her concern with racial and gender issues and analyzes her in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction-making. These classics provide a broad look at critical argument about Toni Morrison's meanings and significance during the past 10 years. From the formative effects of learning one's Otherness as a result of majority perception, to the apocalyptic implications of racial memory, to the moral and psychologically constructive act of storytelling, to the structural function served by improvisational jazz music, to the imagery associated with both flight and naming, to the uniquely female experience of community-major issues raised by Morrison's body of work are explicated here.

The Resurrectionist

The Resurrectionist PDF Author: E. B. Hudspeth
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594746249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Disturbingly lovely . . . The Resurrectionist is itself a cabinet of curiosities, stitching history and mythology and sideshow into an altogether different creature. Deliciously macabre and beautifully grotesque.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus This macabre tale—part dark fantasy, part Gray’s Anatomy—tells the chilling story of a man driven mad by his search for the truth, with hypnotic and horrifying images. Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: that the mythological beasts of legend and lore—including mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact humanity's evolutionary ancestors. And beyond that, he wonders: what if there was a way for humanity to reach the fuller potential these ancestors implied? The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first part is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from his childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, his cruel and crazed experiments, and, finally, his mysterious disappearance. The second part is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts, all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations.