Author: James Monroe Whitfield
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834459
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the ninetee
Author: Benjamin Fagan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108395287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 554
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.
Author: Eric Gardner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108671527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.
Author: Teresa Zackodnik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110869019X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 707
Get Book Here
Book Description
The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.
Author: Virginia Jackson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069123311X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuries Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people—Black, White, male, female, Indigenous—almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry. A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric.
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1410360601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 28
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Matt Sandler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735463
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.
Author: J. M. Whitfield
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513287621
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 60
Get Book Here
Book Description
America and Other Poems (1853) is a book of poems by J.M. Whitfield. Published while the poet was working as a barber in Buffalo, New York, America and Other Poems captures his sense of poetic form while expressing his belief in the abolition of slavery. In these odes, hymns, and prayers, Whitfield established his reputation as a pioneering African American poet, an impassioned voice for his people who tirelessly sought to change the course of history with his words. “The North Star,” which concludes the collection, was written for Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper The North Star, that “guard of truth and liberty” for all. “The writer of the following pages is a poor colored man of this city, engaged in the humble, yet honorable and useful occupation of a barber.” In the introduction to his debut book of poems, J.M. Whitfield proudly and directly asserts his identity. Although he does not fit in with the traditional figure of the poet, Whitfield proves his mastery of form while condemning slavery in the strongest terms. “America” opens the collection with a direct address to the nation “from whence has issued many a band / To tear the black man from his soil, / And force him here to delve and toil”: “America, it is to thee, / Thou boasted land of liberty,— / It is to thee I raise my song, / Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.” Without fear, Whitfield questions the moral and political promise of a nation built by slaves. He demands through song and prayer the advent of a day when to “north and south, and east and west, / The wrongs we bear shall be redressed.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of J.M Whitfield’s America and Other Poems is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Author: Christopher Hanlon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 657
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson to date, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, the digital humanities, the new religious studies, hemispheric American Studies, health humanities, and affect theory among other critical perspectives. Curated between a forward by editor Christopher Hanlon--who makes the case for a capacious and contemporary Emerson--and Cornel West--the activist-scholar whose influential work on Emerson merges with a career of advocacy for economic and racial justice?this collection assesses the history and state of Emerson scholarship while charting pathways for new work on this most essential American writer. Comprised of new works by leading figures in nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies, the volume suggests directions into underexamined facets of Emerson's writing, life, and reputation. From Emerson's engagements with energy infrastructure and the processes of extraction that undergirded the locomotives he rode and the energy economies he sometimes extolled; to the vicissitudes of age he experienced alongside the romantic tropes of youthful vigour he both re-circulated and re-tooled; to Emerson's poetry, both in its philosophical formulations and in its reflections of the material circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture; to Emerson's resonance beyond the United States, elsewhere in the western hemisphere; to the Black press and its refractions of Emersonian transcendentalism in the midst of ante- and post-bellum justice struggles; to the legacies of Emerson to be found in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and in the versions of ?Emerson? to be found in children's literature; to his often-fraught and often-fruitful engagements with reform movements of various sorts; to the prospects for digital processes of re-reading Emerson and his contemporaries' styles of textual production and engagement, The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a necessary resource for students, scholars, and general readers committed to the study of Emerson, transcendentalism, and current critical approaches to United States literature.
Author: Kerry Larson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Get Book Here
Book Description
This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the 'poetess' role and articles featuring specific authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Sarah Piatt. In the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and re-evaluating this largely neglected area of study in US literary history - this Companion reflects and advances this spirit of revisionism.
