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

This study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. The text portrays Nobel Laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its sub-altern origins.

In At Home...

From early 20th-century writings to present-day poetry slams, African American poetry exhibits an impressive range of style and substance. Lorenzo Thomas has written an important new history of the genre that offers a critical reassessment of its development in the 20th century within the contexts of modernism and the troubled racial history of the United States.

Basing his study on literary history,...

In these twelve essays written over the last two decades Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, follows Wright's search in an investigation of the novelist's life and career. Although the essays were not originally intended as a collection, their organization her underscores Wright's literary and intellectual development.

The essays range in time from a bibliographical study of Wright's first scanty personal library to his interest at the end of his life in Negritude and...

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca.
Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and...

Through its critical examination of novels by Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Sherley Anne Williams, Octavia Butler, John Edgar Wideman, Phyllis Perry, Ishmael Reed, Caryl Phillips, and others, The Diasporan Self presents a fresh and insightful approach to canonical and noncanonical contemporary fictional slave narratives. Through his careful study of the discourse of this subgenre, J. Lee Greene formulates a significant new approach to the interpretation of contemporary African American literature.

Drawing directly from the authors' novels, essays, and interviews, Greene...

Richard Wright, born in Mississippi in 1908, was largely self-taught. His only formal schooling was high school. As he recounts in Black Boy, he used a white friend's library card at the Memphis Public Library, where blacks were not allowed. That books were almost -living companions- for Wright is easily understandable. Through books and, later,...

Deep in his cultural roots Richard Wright sensed a natural creative force. He saw it as a manifestation in his grandmother's religiosity and in the lyrics of the blues and in black folk expressions.

His fascination with this -something- inspired his -blueprint for Negro writing- and led him to see connections between Gertrude Stein's use of language, the collage tecnique of surrealism, Kenneth Burke's theories of symbol/orientation formation, Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory, Japanese haiku, and the practical application of indigenous Afro-American folk expression.

To the end of...

Kimberly Nichele Brown examines how African American women since the 1970s have found ways to move beyond the "double consciousness" of the colonized text to develop a healthy subjectivity that attempts to disassociate black subjectivity from its connection to white culture. Brown traces the emergence of this new consciousness from its roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement through important milestones such as the anthology The Black Woman and Essence magazine to the writings of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez.

Studies of traumatic stress have explored the challenges to memory as a result of extreme experience, particularly in relation to the ways in which trauma resonates within the survivor's body and the difficulties survivors face when trying to incorporate their experience into meaningful narratives. Jennifer Griffiths examines the attempts of several African American writers and playwrights to explore ruptures in memory after a traumatic experience and to develop creative strategies for understanding the inscription of trauma on the body in a racialized cultural context.

In the...

The Northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is the second largest community of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States with 500,000 people. Yet, until 2001 the Northeast Valley had no trade bookstores, movie houses, art galleries, or decent cultural spaces. That year Tia Chucha s Centro Cultural opened its doors, first as a cultural cafe, which in ten years has provided workshops in music, visual arts, dance, theater, writing, and indigenous cosmology along with an art gallery, a poetry press, a youth empowerment project, and the only annual outdoor literacy and...

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post-Civil War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of Hopkins's work.
Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century...

Continuum Contemporaries will be a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration for members of book clubs and readings groups, as well as for literature students.The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed, and most influential novels of recent years. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question. The books in the series will all follow the same structure: a biography of the novelist,...

"This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."--Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society

In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the...

"A vade mecum for those interested in the cultural ingredients, the political values, and the artistic sensibilities that united Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King Jr. in spirit, thought, and outlook. Masterfully conceived, meticulously researched, and gracefully written, this book breaks new...

In this remarkable, panoramic work, Peterson del Mar draws on a wide range of sources from literature, film, and music, in...

In Literary Writing in the 21st Century an incredible array of today's leading fiction writers, poets, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers engage in no-holds-barred dialogue about the challenging issues facing writing and publishing today. Whether it's the impact of innovative technologies, proliferation of new modes of teaching and learning, changing economic dynamics for publishers, shifting criteria to judge quality writing in a global context, or redefinitions of authorship amidst larger cultural changes, this book provides a cornucopia of strongly articulated...