William L. Andrews Frances Smith Foster Trudier Harris
This abridgement of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature collects more than 400 biographies (authors, critics, literary characters and historical figures) of both well-known figures and the lives and careers of writers not found in other reference works. The abridgement also includes the 150 plot summaries of major works. The editors include the biographic details for author entries to include mention of major works, death dates, and awards. The volume reprints in its entirety the five-part 15-page essay, Literary History, capturing the full sweep of African-American writing in...
This abridgement of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature collects more than 400 biographies (authors, critics, literary characters and ...
Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in several literary works of the twentieth century. Authors of these works draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations. Instead, strength becomes a problematic trait, at times a disease, in many characters in which it appears. It has a detrimental impact on the relatives and neighbors of such women as well as on the women themselves. The pattern of...
Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black...
James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel.
James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While m...
James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel.
James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While m...
Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the porch."
In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill...
Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytellin...
Best-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. In this provocative study of Morrison's novels, Trudier Harris blends fictive and folkloric approaches to illuminate the depth and complexity of the African-American literary heritage. Morrison stands in a long line of black writers who have grounded their characters, themes, and structures in African-American folk traditions. Typically, students of such grounding have proceeded in two steps--first identifying items of...
Best-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and...
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...
Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature explores the idea of strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging t...
Four of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's moving anti-lynching essays are presented in this volume. Written during the height of the lynching craze at the turn of the century, they elegantly speak to the pain and loss caused by racist thought and action.
Four of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's moving anti-lynching essays are presented in this volume. Written during the height of the lynching craze at the turn o...
By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were perfomring a rite of exorcism designed to eradicate the "black beast" from their midst, or, at the very least, to render him powerless and emasculated. Black writers have graphically portrayed such tragic incidents in their writings. In doing so, they seem to be acting out a communal role--a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race.
Exorcising Blackness demonstrates that the closeness and intensity of black people's historical experiences...
By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were perfomring a rite of exorcism ...
