Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - African American & Black

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem--"the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth." Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his...

Focusing on the trope of passing -- black characters lightskinned enough to pass for white -- M. Giulia Fabi shows how early African-American authors such as William Wells Brown,...

"Heretofore scholars have not been willing--perhaps, even been unable for many reasons both academic and personal--to identify much of the Harlem Renaissance work as same-sex oriented.... An important book." --Jim Elledge

This groundbreaking study explores the Harlem Renaissance as a literary phenomenon fundamentally shaped by same-sex-interested men. Christa Schwarz focuses on Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent and explores these writers' sexually dissident or gay literary voices. The portrayals of men-loving men in these writers' works vary...

Jean Toomer's adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie--Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman--and, through them, the mystic's influence on many of the notables in African American literature.
Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the...

This remarkable exploration of the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930 takes readers through the city's inexhaustible variety of distinctive neighborhood cultures. Slumming in New York shows how the city's rich and poor, foreign-born and native-born, competed for a voice from such diverse vantage points as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and mythic Harlem.

Investigating a wide range of New York "slumming" narratives in which mainstream outsiders write about marginalized urban insiders, Robert M. Dowling...