Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature

ISBN-13: 9780312293000 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 218 str.

Trudier Harris

Opis

Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature explores the idea of strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in major literary works of the 20th century. Looking at work by Hansberry, Morrison, Bambara, West, Gaines, Reed, and others, Trudier Harris shows how writers draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations. She argues forcefully that the portrayal of women characters as strong is problematic in African American literature, and this pattern has become so pronounced that it has stifled the literature.

Recenzje

'...vivid and provactive descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - Charlotte Observer

'...vivid and provocative descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - D.G. Martin, Rocky Mount Telegram

Spis treści

Preface Introduction: The Black Female Body: Seeing, Believing, and Perpetuating Popular and Literary Images A Raisin in the Sun : The Strong Black Women as Acceptable Tyrant Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery I: Even Parody: Ishmael Reed and Mammy Barracuda Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery II: Survival Beyond Survival: The Price of Strength in Beloved Commanding the Universe: I. More Than Witch: Bambara's Minnie Ransom II. Tough Enough to Kill, Tough Enough to Transcend Death: J. California Cooper's Clora Strength as Disease Bordering on Evil: Dorothy West's Cleo Judson The Stubbornness of Tradition: I. Do What Big Mama Sez: Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying II. New Territory, No Change: Pear; Cleage's Flyin' West Balance? Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower Conclusion Can this Mold be Broken?

O autorze

TRUDIER HARRIS is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Tony Morrison (1991), and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zona Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996). She has co-edited a number of influential works, including several volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).