African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places

ISBN-13: 9781137003508 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 285 str.

Maisha Wester

Opis

Anyone who has seen a horror film or read a Stephen King novel is familiar with gothic tropes: dark villains who never tire of chasing hapless maidens; supernatural monsters; heroes who are sometimes weak; twisted, yet uncannily familiar, landscapes; the list goes on. Yet the gothic is more than a long list of tropes deployed to terrify. African American Gothic reveals the myriad ways African American writers manipulate the gothic genre to critique traditional racial ideologies. The book investigates fiction from each major era in African American culture, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora, to show how the gothic-when revised-serves as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America.

Recenzje

'While there have been partial studies of African American Gothic fictions, this excellent book is now the most lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account on this important subject. Nowhere else can readers so clearly grasp in so many examples so well analyzed how African American authors have radically transformed specifically Gothic conventions to make them profoundly symbolic of the horrors and complexities of the black American experience.' - Jerrold E. Hogle, Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona

Spis treści

PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC  Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-writings of Gothic Motifs  Babo Speaks Back: White Violence, Black Resistance in Nineteenth Century Black Fiction 'The Dark Sunshine Aboveground': Questions of Progress and Migration in Ellison and Toomer  PART II: BLACK GOTHIC AT MILLENIUM'S END 'What, after all, am I': The Terrors of (Collective) Identity  'Murdered By Piece-meal': The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved  The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Re-inscription in A Visitation of Spirits and 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead'

O autorze

Maisha L. Wester is an assistant professor of English and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University.