Wrestling Angels into Song

Wrestling Angels into Song PDF Author: Herman Beavers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512800856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison's influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers. For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

Wrestling Angels into Song

Wrestling Angels into Song PDF Author: Herman Beavers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512800856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison's influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers. For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

The Non-Literate Other

The Non-Literate Other PDF Author: Helga Ramsey-Kurz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401204713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Public debates on the benefits and dangers of mass literacy prompted nineteenth-century British authors to write about illiteracy. Since the early twentieth century writers outside Europe have paid increasing attention to the subject as a measure both of cultural dependence and independence. So far literary studies has taken little notice of this. The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English offers explanations for this lack of interest in illiteracy amongst scholars of literature, and attempts to remedy this neglect by posing the question of how writers use their literacy to write about a condition radically unlike their own. Answers to this question are given in the analysis of nineteen works featuring illiterates yet never before studied for doing so. The book explores the scriptlessness of Neanderthals in William Golding, of barbarians in Angela Carter, David Malouf, and J.M. Coetzee, of African natives in Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, of Maoris in Patricia Grace and Chippewas in Louise Erdrich, of fugitive or former slaves and their descendants in Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Gaines, of Untouchables in Mulk Raj Anand and Salman Rushdie, and of migrants in Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, and Amy Tan. In so doing it conveys a clear sense of the complexity and variability of the phenomenon of non-literacy as well as its fictional resourcefulness.

The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction PDF Author: Darryl Dickson-Carr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231510691
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.

Recipes for Respect

Recipes for Respect PDF Author: Rafia Zafar
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action—that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression—African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

From the Plantation to the Prison

From the Plantation to the Prison PDF Author: Tara T. Green
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780881460902
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
According to George Jackson, black men born in the US are conditioned to accept the inevitability of being imprisoned.... "Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortune that led so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments." As Jackson writes from his prison cell, his statement may seem to be only a product of his current status. However, history proves his point. Indeed, some of the most well-known and respected black men have served time in jail or prison. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass. This book is an examination of the various forms that imprisonment, as asocial, historical, and political experience of African Americans, has taken. Confinement describes the status of individuals who are placed within boundaries-either seen or unseen-but always felt. A word that suggests extensive implications, confinement describes the status of persons who are imprisoned and who are unjustly relegated to a social status that is hostile, rendering them powerless and subject to the rules of the authorities. Arguably, confinement appropriately describes the status of African Americans who have endured spaces of confinement, which include, but are not limited to plantations, Jim Crow societies, and prisons. At specific times, these "spaces of confinement" have been used to oppress African Americans socially, politically, and spiritually. Contributors examine the related experiences of Malcolm X, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and Angela Davis.

Learning Places

Learning Places PDF Author: Masao Miyoshi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822328407
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
DIVExamines the institutions and productions of area studies and explores what it takes to "learn a place."/div

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Brian W. Shaffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405192445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1581

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Book Description
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

Cutting Along the Color Line

Cutting Along the Color Line PDF Author: Quincy T. Mills
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220865X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space. Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.

Obsession

Obsession PDF Author: Carolyn Beard Whitlow
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1611685303
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The sestina (of medieval French origin) is a complex poetic form of 39 lines (six sestets and a three-line "envoy") in which the six end-words (teleutons) of the lines of the first sestet stanza are repeated in a specific order as teleutons in the five succeeding sestets. In the envoy, the six teleutons are again picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing, each line. Because of the complexity of the form, the sestina fell out of favor with poets for several decades. However, a twenty-first century revival of the form is underway. This is the first anthology of sestinas that showcases both traditional and innovative examples of the form by modern and contemporary poets, award winners, and emerging writers alike. Organized by such themes as Americana; Art; Love and Sex; and Memory, Contemplation, Retrospection, and Death, the collection also includes sestinas with irregular teleutons and unconventional sestinas. An evocative introduction by Marilyn Krysl acquaints readers with the form. The volume concludes with useful indexes of first lines and teleutons, increasing access to the poems beyond the poets' names.

Manning the Race

Manning the Race PDF Author: Marlon B. Ross
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814775624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the first half of the 20th C.