The neo-slave narrative is an important development in American literary history and has serious revisionist intentions at its foundation. This book examines how contemporary African American women writers have shaped the genre. These authors have written neo-slave narratives to reinscribe history from the perspective of the African American woman, most specifically the nineteenth century enslaved mother. The writers considered in this study--Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler--explore American slavery through the lens of gender, both...

Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne's book overviews the ways in which Africa has been employed as a powerful setting for American novels written since World War II. Kuhne argues that contemporary American novels with African settings are largely didactic, that these novels convey specific lessons about Africa and Africans, and...

During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American culture flourished. The period gave birth to numerous significant and enduring creative works that were at once American and emblematic of the black experience in particular. It was a time when African-American culture became more distinct from American culture in general, though it also continued to be a part of America's larger cultural heritage. While the writers, artists, and intellectuals who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance recognized that they had much in common, they also sought to distinguish themselves from one another. This...

Dr. Alexis Brooks De Vita takes up the challenge to develop culturally relevant modes of literary analysis of African/Diaspora literatures by identifying traditional African and Diaspora figures of myth, religion, legend, and history that interact with African and Diaspora literary heroines and their authors. Following upon Karla Holloway's arguments in "Moorings and Metaphors" that African American and West African women share strong traits of storytelling that both isolate and identify their literatures, Brooks De Vita traces these traits to their religious, legendary, and historical...

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical...

Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966) was both a participant in and historian of the Harlem Renaissance, probably the most significant movement in African American literature and culture. Known mostly for his poetry, and an unduly neglected figure in American literary history, Tolson was one of the first African American critics of the Harlem Renaissance. This book is an edition of his 1940 MA thesis, the first academic study of the Harlem Renaissance written by an African American scholar. Tolson's thesis, previously unpublished in its entirety, provides a unique look at this important era and...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Steve Reich was considered a fringe experimentalist. His work consisted largely of repeating, slowly changing patterns unlike either the serialism or the aleatory that predominated at that time. Today, however, Reich is one of the most prominent and celebrated contemporary composers, one about whom the scholarly and popular literature offers an assortment of critical, historical, and analytical perspectives. Author D.J. Hoek's bio-bibliography serves as an essential guide to this literature, comprehensively surveying Reich's life and work.

Included are...

This book presents a comprehensive overview of Black leadership in every aspect of American life, including movements for social justice, education, business, and politics. In the quest for human rights and social advancement, African-American leaders have emerged to lead the fight to overcome racial and economic barriers. This struggle has influenced the exercise of Black leadership in many other areas and the author uses an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the changes, continuities, and variety of African-American approaches to effective leadership. The book also suggests a...

Through narrative and rhetorical strategies that subvert genre and challenge the discourse of race and gender, black South African woman writer Bessie Head creates alternative healing spaces that empower and enoble the marginalized, provide potential for transcendence and self-creation, and render ineffective the power of language to subjugate. This book features new critical material on her life and works and explores the techniques she uses to inscribe an idealistic vision in response to the psychic fragmentation and rootlessness she experienced as an exile.

The traumatized characters...

Midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue. The author demonstrates how this attack on sin expressed the punitive social policy of the French Catholic Reformation and how Louis's actions clarified the legal and moral distinctions between crime and sin.

As a hot-blooded young prince, Louis XIV paid little attention to...