Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134838344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms. This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.
Author: Winston Napier
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814758096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 745
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Book Description
Fifty-one essays by writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as critics and academics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examine the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. Contributions are organized chronologically beginning with the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Black Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Angelyn Mitchell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Book Description
Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon. The essays in this collection--many of which are not widely available today--either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism. A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience. Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright
Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674268261
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Warren’s view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, Warren’s work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.
Author: Mark Christian Thompson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816427
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
The essence of the matter -- The politics of Black friendship : Gadamer, Baldwin and the Black hermeneutic -- The Aardvark of history : Malcolm X, language and power -- Black aesthetic autonomy : Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and "literary Negro-ness" -- The revolutionary will not be hypnotized : Eldridge Cleaver and Black ideology -- Unrepeatable : Angela Y. Davis and Black critical theory -- Black aesthetic theory.
Author: Sandra Adell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252021091
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
"'It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.' For Adell, W. E. B. Du Bois's famous articulation of the 'twoness' of black Americans is the key to understanding the 'double bind' which afflicts contemporary African-American literary theory. . . . The book] demands and deserves recognition as a cogent intervention." -- Yearbook of English Studies
Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226167283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.
Author: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226035376
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Featuring the work of the most distinguished scholars in the field, this volume assesses the state of Afro-American literary study and projects a vision of that study for the 1990s. "A rich and rewarding collection."—Choice. "This diverse and inspired collection . . . testifies to the Afro-Am academy's extraordinary vitality."—Voice Literary Supplement
Author: Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195136470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
A groundbaking work of enduring influence. The Signifying Monkey illuminates the relationship between the African and African American vernacular traditions and literature. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. This superb twenty-fifth-anniversary edition features a new preface and introduction by Gates that reflect on the book's genesis and its continuing relevance for today's culture, as well as a new afterword written by the noted critic W.J.T. Mitchell. --Book Jacket.
Author: John Cullen Gruesser
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820326030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
"For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in post-colonial or African American literary studies to attempt to break down the boundaries that in recent years have come to isolate the two fields. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that raises one or more questions about the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker."--BOOK JACKET.
