Literary Ambition and the African American Novel

ISBN-13: 9781108482073 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 265 str.

Michael Nowlin

Opis

This book is for readers interested in how the modern African American novel entered and changed the mainstream of American literature. It tells the story of the ambitious, competitive authors who wrote the landmark African American novels while also struggling against the positions they had won as 'Negro authors'.

Recenzje

'Michael Nowlin's Literary Ambition and the African American Novel is a provocative application of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field to the work of several generations of twentieth-century African American novelists. Nowlin reveals the use these authors made of a narrative of prior black artistic backwardness and provincialism, from which they sought to distinguish themselves.  From Charles Chesnutt to Ralph Ellison, they thus hoped to ascend to the realm of 'art' as defined internationally and intergenerationally, and to put African American literature on the map of 'world literature'.' George Hutchinson, Cornell University

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. 'The first Negro novelist': Charles Chesnutt's point of view and the emergence of African American literature; 2. James Weldon Johnson's dream of literary greatness and his groundwork for an African American literary renaissance; 3. The strange literary career of Jean Toomer; 4. Wallace Thurman's judgment and 'this obvious rush toward modernism'; 5. Zora Neale Hurston and the great unwritten; 6. Richard Wright's compromises: radicalism and celebrity as paths to literary freedom; 7. 'Literary to a fault': the singular triumph of Ralph Ellison; Conclusion.