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

During the last two decades, African American writers have emerged as a distinct and dominant force in world literature. This force has been gathering momentum since the 1950s, when James Baldwin published some of his most compelling works and Ralph Ellison stunned the literary establishment with his dazzling "Invisible Man" (1952). Empowered by the Civil Rights Movement and revitalized by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, this force became more potent and pervasive. The publication of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" in 1970 was a major event in the literary history of the United...

The tremendous universal appeal of Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" took the book world by storm. With her third novel finally earning her the recognition and respect she richly deserved, Terry McMillan followed up with "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," which continued to attract new and loyal fans from all walks of life. In this critical work Richards places these inspirational works, as well as McMillan's earlier writings, in their deserved cultural and literary context. Richards offers an insightful analysis of McMillan's narrative technique, which, while having roots in the blues...

Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography. Since the rise of Black Studies in the late 1960s, leading critics have constructed black lives and letters as antitheses of the ways and writings of mainstream American culture. According to such thinking, black writing stems from a set of experiences very different from the world of whites, and black autobiography must therefore differ radically from heroic white American tales. But in pointing to differences...

Anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of the most significant African American writers of the 20th century. Born in Alabama, she grew up in a small town in Florida, where she developed an interest in African American folklore. In 1925 she moved to New York and became part of the Harlem Renaissance, meeting such figures as Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. She continued her anthropological research at Barnard under Franz Boas, and African American folklore became central to her fiction. She is best remembered as the author of DEGREESIJonah's Gourd Vine,...

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the most controversial yet prominent figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This introductory study examines Hurston's contributions to that literary movement, as well as her role as mediator between the black and white worlds in which she lived. Readers will appeciate the clear presentation of the biographical facts of her life, as well as an overview of the issues and varying perceptions surrounding her literary achievements. A full chapter is devoted to analysing each of Hurston's major works of fiction: "Jonah's Gourd Vine "(1934),...

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...

Covering 46 poets from more than two centuries of African American literary history, this biocritical dictionary is an important contribution to any reference collection. The poets are situated within their historical and literary context, and for each a brief biographical sketch is given, with information on the poet's personal history, education, influences, and accomplishments. Each entry examines the poet's work as a whole, with a discussion of selected important poems and their recurrent themes. Students and interested readers will gain a good appreciation for the stylistic features...

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 each of her five novels, Gloria Naylor invites the reader to join her characters in their journeys to move beyond established boundaries and embrace an increasingly diverse society. With lucid analyses of each work, this Critical Companion helps readers comprehend how Naylor successfully links the trials of her African American characters to the struggles of human beings at variance with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Insights into Naylor's own struggles and successes are provided in a richly drawn biographical chapter, which incorporates fresh materials from a recent interview...

There is growing popular and scholarly interest in autobiography, along with increasing regard for the achievements of African American writers. The first reference of its kind, this volume chronicles the autobiographical tradition in African American literature. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 66 African American authors who present autobiographical material in their works. The volume profiles major figures, such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, along with many lesser known autobiographers who deserve...

African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance generally fall into three aesthetic categories: the folk, which emphasizes oral traditions, African American English, rural settings, and characters from lower socioeconomic levels; the bourgeois, which privileges characters from middle class backgrounds; and the proletarian, which favors overt critiques of oppression by contending that art should be an instrument of propaganda. Depending on critical assumptions regarding what constitutes authentic African American literature, some writers have been valorized, others dismissed.

This...

On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer, walking from village to village, tending to the sick, waiting for a sign from God. In this dream, his one companion, Moustique, wants to exploit his power. Moustique decides to impersonate a prophet himself, ignoring a coffin-maker who warns him he will die and enraging the people of the island. Hobain, half-awake in his desolate jail cell,...

Derek Walcott's eighth collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, is divided into two parts--"Here," verse evoking the poet's native Caribbean, and "Elsewhere." It opens with six poems in quatrains whose memorable, compact lines further Walcott's continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people.

For several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the United States. "The Arkansas Testament," one of the book's long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem's crisis is the taking on of an extra history, one that...

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

This work expands the scope of Morrison's project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author's specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization's primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of...