New Essays on the African American Novel

New Essays on the African American Novel PDF Author: L. King
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023061275X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This collection contributes to scholarly discussions about the African American novel as a literary form. Essays respond to the general question, what has been the impact of the African American vernacular tradition from the spirituals, blues, gospel and jazz to hip hop on the structure and style of the modern African American novel?

New Essays on Poe's Major Tales

New Essays on Poe's Major Tales PDF Author: Kenneth Silverman
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521422437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
A variety of critical approaches illuminate different facets of Poe's complex imagination by concentrating on such famous tales as The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

New Essays on the African American Novel

New Essays on the African American Novel PDF Author: L. King
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023061275X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This collection contributes to scholarly discussions about the African American novel as a literary form. Essays respond to the general question, what has been the impact of the African American vernacular tradition from the spirituals, blues, gospel and jazz to hip hop on the structure and style of the modern African American novel?

Long Black Song

Long Black Song PDF Author: Houston A. Baker
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813913018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Houston Baker maintains that black American culture, grounded in a unique historical experience, is distinct from any other, and that it has produced a body of literature that is equally and demonstrably unique in its sources, values, and modes of expression. He argues that black American literature is rooted in black folklore- animal tales, trickster slave tales, religious tales, folk songs, spirituals, and ballads- and that a knowledge of this tradition is essential to the understanding of any individual black author or work. To deomonstrate the continuity of this tradition, Baker examines themes that appear in folklore and persist throughout contemporary black literature. "Freedom and Apocalypse," for example, traces the idea that black Americans are a chosen people who will, by some violent means, overthrow the white man's tyranny. The essays culminate in an examination of the life and work of Richard Wright. Baker's treatment of Wright as a black American artist who recorded the black man's shift from an agrarian to an urban setting places Wright and the tradition of black literature and culture in a fresh perspective.

Engaging Tradition, Making It New

Engaging Tradition, Making It New PDF Author: Stephanie Brown
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527563723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Engaging Tradition, Making It New offers a rich collection of fresh scholarly and pedagogical approaches to new African American literature. Organized around the theme of transgression, the collection focuses on those writers who challenge the reading habits and expectations of students and instructors, whether by engaging themes and literary forms not usually associated with African American literature or by departing from traditional modes of approaching historical, social, or legal struggles. Each chapter offers a specific reading of a particular novel, memoir, or poetry collection, sometimes in concert with a second, related text, and suggests both a useful critical context and one or more pedagogical approaches. Engaging Tradition, Making It New points the way toward exciting new methods of teaching and researching authors in this dynamic field.

Long Hammering

Long Hammering PDF Author: Albert James Williams-Myers
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"Long Hammering addresses the integral role that African Americans played in every aspect of Hudson Valley society, which historically is the embryo of New York history. From the time of the colonial period when enslaved African labor was vital tot he tremendous wealth New York generated as a British Colony, to the end of the 19th century when a more democratic society was, African American involvement was a historical fact." -- Publisher's description.

The Postwar African American Novel

The Postwar African American Novel PDF Author: Stephanie Brown
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604739746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their status as "lesser lights" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.

New Essays on Native Son

New Essays on Native Son PDF Author: Keneth Kinnamon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521348225
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
A collection of essays providing original insights into this major American novel by Richard Wright.

South of Tradition

South of Tradition PDF Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
With characteristic originality and insight, Trudier Harris-Lopez offers a new and challenging approach to the work of African American writers in these twelve previously unpublished essays. Collectively, the essays show the vibrancy of African American literary creation across several decades of the twentieth century. But Harris-Lopez's readings of the various texts deliberately diverge from traditional ways of viewing traditional topics. South of Tradition focuses not only on well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, but also on up-and-coming writers such as Randall Kenan and less-known writers such as Brent Wade and Henry Dumas. Harris-Lopez addresses themes of sexual and racial identity, reconceptualizations of and transcendence of Christianity, analyses of African American folk and cultural traditions, and issues of racial justice. Many of her subjects argue that geography shapes identity, whether that geography is the European territory many blacks escaped to from the oppressive South, or the South itself, where generations of African Americans have had to come to grips with their relationship to the land and its history. For Harris-Lopez, "south of tradition" refers both to geography and to readings of texts that are not in keeping with expected responses to the works. She explains her point of departure for the essays as "a slant, an angle, or a jolt below the line of what would be considered the norm for usual responses to African American literature." The scope of Harris-Lopez's work is tremendous. From her coverage of noncanonical writers to her analysis of humor in the best-selling The Color Purple, she provides essential material that should inform all future readings of African American literature.

Contemporary African American Fiction

Contemporary African American Fiction PDF Author: Dana A. Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays, edited by Dana A. Williams, eight contributors examine trends and ideas which characterize African American fiction since 1970. They investigate many of the key inquiries which inform discussions about the condition of contemporary African American fiction. The range of queries is wide and varied. How does African American fiction represent the changing times in America and the world? How are these changes reflected in narrative strategies or in narrative content? How do contemporary fictionists engage diasporic Africanisms, or how do they renegotiate Americanism? What is the impact of cultural production, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity on this fiction? How does contemporary African American fiction reconstruct or rewrite earlier "classic" African American, American, or world literature? Authors under study include Ernest J. Gaines, Ishmael Reed, Edwidge Danticat, Octavia E. Butler, Olympia Vernon, Toni Morrison, and Reginald McKnight, among others. These essays remind us that the African American literary tradition is about survival and liberation. The tradition is similarly about probing, challenging, changing, and redirecting accepted ways of thinking to ensure the wellness and the freedom of its community cohorts. The essays identify new ways contemporary African American fiction continues the tradition's liberatory inclinations--they interrogate the ways in which antecedent texts and traditions influence contemporary texts to create new traditions.

Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature

Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature PDF Author: James S. Mellis
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476669627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.