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

In At Home...

Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature--particularly that produced by black women--is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self--an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture.

In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, ...

Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature--particularly that produced by black women--is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self--an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture.

In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, ...

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...

With characteristic originality and insight, Trudier Harris-Lopez offers a new and challenging approach to the work of African American writers in these twelve previously unpublished essays. Collectively, the essays show the vibrancy of African American literary creation across several decades of the twentieth century. But Harris-Lopez's readings of the various texts deliberately diverge from traditional ways of viewing traditional topics.

"South of Tradition" focuses not only on well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, but also on...

Ever since slaves in America labored to produce food surfeit while enduring personal food shortage, says Andrew Warnes, African American writers have consistently drawn connections between hunger and illiteracy, and by extension between food and reading. This book investigates the juxtaposition of malnutrition and spectacular food abundance as a key trope of African American writing. Focusing on works by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, Warnes considers how black characters respond with a wide variety of countermaneuvers to whites' attempts at regulating access to...

"Sentimental Confessions" is a groundbreaking study of evangelicalism, sentimentalism, and nationalism in early African American holy women s autobiography. At its core are analyses of the life writings of six women--Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Prince, Mattie J. Jackson, and Julia Foote--all of which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century.

Joycelyn Moody shows how these authors appropriated white-sanctioned literary conventions to assert their voices and to protest the racism, patriarchy, and other forces that created and sustained their poverty and enslavement. In...

When twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Walker's first collection of poems, "For My People," won the Yale Poets Award in 1942, she was just beginning her long and distinguished career as a poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher. When her novel "Jubilee" was published to great acclaim in 1966, the "New York Review of Books" said, " It] chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages."

"Jubilee" is noteworthy for being one of the first novels to present African American history from both a black and female perspective. It is a historical and fictional account of Walker's...

This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Huck, who resolves to "go to hell" rather than turn over the runaway slave Jim, in time betrays his companion.

Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following Huckleberry Finn to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in our fiction--notably southern fiction--just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection...

In "The Hammers of Creation," Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African-American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," Zora Neale Hurston's "Jonah's Gourd Vine," and Arna Bontemps's "Black Thunder."

Sundquist explains how the survival of cultural traditions originating in Africa and in slavery became a means of historical reflection and artistic creation for modern writers. He goes on to illustrate and compare how the three representative novels use aspects of...

Taking a close look at all the key male figures in Toni Morrison s eight novels, this book explores Morrison s admitted, but critically neglected, interest in the relationships between African American men and women and the axes on which these relationships turn. Most Morrison scholarship deals with her female characters. "Can t I Love What I Criticize?" offers a response to this imbalance and to Morrison s call for more work on men, who remain, in her words, outside of that little community value thing.

The book also considers the barriers between black men and women thrown up by their...