Download or read book A Literary Life of Sutton E Griggs written by John Cullen Gruesser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churches in three Southern states and played a leading role in the influential but understudied National Baptist Convention. Until recently, little was known about the personal and professional life of this religious and community leader. Thus, critics could only contextualize his literary texts to a limited degree and were forced to speculate about how he published them. This literary biography, the first written about the author, draws extensively on primary sources and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, local and national, African American and white. A very different Sutton Griggs emerges from these materials—a dynamic figure who devoted himself to literature for a longer period and to a more profound extent than has ever been previously imagined but also someone who frequently found himself embroiled in controversy because of what he said in his writings and the means he used to publish them. The book challenges currently held notions about the audience for, and the content, production, and dissemination of politically engaged US black fiction, altering the perception of the African American literature and print culture of the period.

Download or read book A Literary Life of Sutton E Griggs written by John Cullen Gruesser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churches in three Southern states and played a leading role in the influential but understudied National Baptist Convention. Until recently, little was known about the personal and professional life of this religious and community leader. Thus, critics could only contextualize his literary texts to a limited degree and were forced to speculate about how he published them. This literary biography, the first written about the author, draws extensively on primary sources and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, local and national, African American and white. A very different Sutton Griggs emerges from these materials--a dynamic figure who devoted himself to literature for a longer period and to a more profound extent than has ever been previously imagined but also someone who frequently found himself embroiled in controversy because of what he said in his writings and the means he used to publish them. The book challenges currently held notions about the audience for, and the content, production, and dissemination of politically engaged US black fiction, altering the perception of the African American literature and print culture of the period.

Download or read book Sutton E Griggs and the Struggle Against White Supremacy written by Finnie D. Coleman and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was a significant African American social reformer, pastor, and prolific writer. His successful first novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899), addressed in a forceful way the plight of Black Americans in post-Reconstruction America. Using Griggs's life story as a platform, Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle against White Supremacy explores how conservative pragmatism shaped the dynamics of race relations and racial politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More precisely, the book examines the various intellectual tactics that Griggs developed to combat white supremacy. Author Finnie D. Coleman shows that Griggs was a pivotal shaper of a racial uplift philosophy that bore little relationship to more melioristic attempts at racial reconciliation. Coleman explores how Griggs's family-particularly his father-influenced his political ideology. Coleman examines why and how Griggs toyed with militant and at times violent fictional responses to white supremacy when his background and temperament were profoundly conservative and peaceful. Ultimately, Griggs yielded to his father's brand of pragmatic conservatism, but not before he produced a number of works of fiction and nonfiction that pushed the boundaries of what were acceptable reactions to the racial status quo of his day. The author addresses other questions about Griggs's work: How did his fiction capture the generational differences between African Americans born in antebellum America and those who came of age at the end of the Gilded Age? Which rhetorical conventions proved effective against the ever-obdurate Jim Crow? Why have critical assessments of his works varied so greatly over the years? Most important, when compared with other writings of his day, why have his texts been so thoroughly marginalized? This new volume adds to our understanding of Griggs's literary career and his role as one of the most widely read and selflessly dedicated intellectual leaders of his day.

Download or read book Imperium in Imperio written by Sutton E. Griggs and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Segregation in America at the beginning of the 20th century was at its peak. The Jim Crow laws enforced racial discrimination. In this political situation, a black man had a hard time wishing to go to college. A smart young man Belton Piedmont faces numerous difficulties. He has no money to go to college, and when he finally finds financing, he is to face all the pains of segregation: inequality, social ostracism, and despise. In these conditions, he has to overcome different challenges, like a false accusation, mob attacks, unfair court hearing, and finding the strength to unite with the fellows to fight back.

Download or read book Imperium in Imperio written by Sutton E. Griggs and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperium in Imperio (1899) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Written while Sutton was at the beginning of his career as a Baptist minister, Imperium in Imperio was sold door to door and earned modest praise upon publication. Although Griggs’ novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era’s most radical literary efforts by an African American writer. Born and raised in rural Virginia, Belton Piedmont knows the struggle of the poor Black American firsthand. In school, he befriends Bernard Belgrave, a young boy from a wealthier family who ends up enrolling in Harvard, leaving his roots for the center of American success. Although Belton remains behind, he devotes himself to activism and receives a check from an anti-lynching politician allowing him to attend college in Nashville. On campus, he gains a reputation for his radical politics, organizing acts of civil disobedience in order to oppose the segregation and inequality rampant at the institution. When a lynch mob leaves him gravely wounded, he wakes up on an operating table in a panic and accidentally kills his physician. His trial gains national attention, earning him the support of his old friend Bernard and his prominent political allies, who help Belton appeal his case. Years later, Bernard receives a cryptic invitation to Waco, Texas, where he finds Belton waiting for him. A group of Black nationalists have established a functional shadow state, and intend to use their power to secede from the Union. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sutton E Griggs’ Imperium and Imperio is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Download or read book Overshadowed written by Sutton E. Griggs and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overshadowed: A Novel (1901) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Published just two years after his debut novel, Overshadowed takes a different angle on the political reality of African Americans than Griggs explored in Imperium in Imperio. Taking an ironic tone, he examines the intersection of race and gender in the burgeoning Black middle-class to explore and critique the politics of liberalism and assimilation. Although Griggs’ novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era’s most radical literary efforts by an African American writer. “[T]he grain that came to life under the oak has its peculiar struggles. It must contend for sustenance with the roots of the oak. It must wrestle with the shade of the oak. The life of this isolated grain of corn is one continuous tragedy. Overshadowed is the story of this grain of corn, the Anglo-Saxon being the oak, and the Negro the plant struggling for existence.” Introducing his second novel, Griggs sets the stage for a story of perseverance, a quality possessed by both Erma Wysong and Astral Herndon. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Erma and Astral are representative of the emerging Black middle class. As they each go off to college and embark on a path to a promising young adulthood, they hope to take advantage of opportunities that weren’t afforded to their parents. Secretly, however, Astral hopes to return to Richmond and win Erma’s hand in marriage, believing that time and distance will convince her that he can be more than a friend. Although their love grows stronger, Astral finds himself flooded with doubt regarding one aspect of Erma’s identity—although she was raised by Black parents, her birth father was a white man. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sutton E Griggs’ Overshadowed: A Novel is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Download or read book The Matter of Black Living written by Autumn Womack and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What did the "Negro problem," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, look like? Autumn Womack's study examines efforts to visualize Black social life through new technologies and disciplines-from photography and film to statistics-in the decades between 1880 and 1930. Womack describes nothing less than a "racial data revolution," one in which social scientists, reformers, and theorists rendered Black life an inanimate object of inquiry. At the very same time, Black cultural producers staged their own kind of revolution, undisciplining racial data in ways that challenged normative visual regimes and capturing the dynamism of Black social life. Womack focuses on figures like W.E.B DuBois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as lesser-known editors, social reformers, and performers. She shows how they harnessed media as diverse as the social survey, the novel, the stage, and early motion pictures to reform visual practices and recalibrate the relationship between data and black life"--

Download or read book Untimely Democracy written by Gregory Laski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: -- Table of Contents: -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Democracy's Progress -- Chapter One: On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past: Reading Thomas Jefferson and W.E.B. Du Bois in the Times of Slavery and Freedom -- Chapter Two: Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass's Life and Times -- Chapter Three: Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery -- Chapter Four: Failed Futures: Of Prophecy and Pessimism at the Nadir -- Chapter Five: Pauline E. Hopkins's Untimely Democracy (Stasis, Agitation, Agency) -- Epilogue: Democracy's Plunges

Download or read book Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

Download or read book How Long How Long written by Belinda Robnett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long? How Long? presents both a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have egregiously neglected the most important leaders of the Civil Rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women. Author Belinda Robnett argues that the diversity of experiences of the African-American women organizers has been underemphasized in favor of monolithic treatments of their femaleness and blackness. Drawing heavily on interviews with actual participants in the American Civil Rights movement, this work retells the movement as seen through the eyes and spoken through the voices of African-American women participants. It is the first book to provide an analysis of race, class, gender, and culture as substructures that shaped the organization and outcome of the movement. Robnett examines the differences among women participants in the movement and offers the first cohesive analysis of the gendered relations and interactions among its black activists, thus demonstrating that femaleness and blackness cannot be viewed as sufficient signifiers for movement experience and individual identity. Finally, this book makes a significant contribution to social movement theory by providing a crucial understanding of the continuity and complexity of social movements, clarifying the need for different layers of leadership that come to satisfy different movement needs. An engaging narrative history as well as a major contribution to social movement and feminist theory, How Long? How Long? will appeal to students and scholars of social activism, women's studies, American history, and African-American studies, and to general readers interested in the perennially fascinating story of the American Civil Rights movement.

Download or read book African American Authors 1745 1945 written by Emmanuel S. Nelson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2000-01-30 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a dramatic resurgence of interest in early African American writing. Since the accidental rediscovery and republication of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig in 1983, the works of dozens of 19th and early 20th century black writers have been recovered and reprinted. There is now a significant revival of interest in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; and in the last decade alone, several major assessments of 18th and 19th century African American literature have been published. Early African American literature builds on a strong oral tradition of songs, folktales, and sermons. Slave narratives began to appear during the late 18th and early 19th century, and later writers began to engage a variety of themes in diverse genres. A central objective of this reference book is to provide a wide-ranging introduction to the first 200 years of African American literature. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 78 black writers active between 1745 and 1945. Among these writers are essayists, novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, and autobiographers. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the author's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography.

Download or read book Unfettered written by Sutton E. Griggs and published by Mint Editions. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfettered: A Novel (1902) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Sutton's third novel is a story of violence and forced migration that explores and critiques the politics of liberalism and assimilation in twentieth century America. Although Griggs' novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era's most radical literary efforts by an African American writer. When Lemuel Dalton takes control of his father's estate, he sets out to make a show of force against Samuel, an ex-slave who oversees the Dalton family farm. When a fight breaks out between Lemuel and Harry, Samuel's son, he shoots the young Black man in cold blood, gravely wounding him. As the threat of an imminent race war increases tensions in the rural Southern community, a group of white men takes advantage of the unrest to lynch and kill Beulah, Samuel's defiant daughter. When it becomes clear that the state is determined to protect the interests of those in power, the Black community flees en masse to the city. Newlyweds Morlene and Harry--who survived his encounter with Lemuel--set out in search of safety, settling down to start their lives anew. But when Morlene meets Dorlan, a local activist, she begins to have doubts about her marriage. Engaged with some of the leading social issues of its era--American imperialism, lynching, and the movement for economic self-determination in the Black community--Unfettered is a brilliant novel from an underrecognized talent of twentieth century literature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sutton E Griggs' Unfettered: A Novel is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Download or read book Making Oscar Wilde written by Michèle Mendelssohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Packed with new evidence, "Making Oscar Wilde" tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michele Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.

Download or read book Before Harlem written by Ajuan Maria Mance and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today’s readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance. As editor Ajuan Mance notes, previous collections have focused mainly on writing that found a significant audience among white readers. Consequently, authors whose work appeared in African American–owned publications for a primarily black audience—such as Solomon G. Brown, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune—have faded from memory. Even figures as celebrated as Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar are today much better known for their “cross-racial” writings than for the larger bodies of work they produced for a mostly African American readership. There has also been a tendency in modern canon making, especially in the genre of autobiography, to stress antebellum writing rather than writings produced after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Similarly, religious writings—despite the centrality of the church in the everyday lives of black readers and the interconnectedness of black spiritual and intellectual life—have not received the emphasis they deserve. Filling those critical gaps with a selection of 143 works by 65 writers, Before Harlem presents as never before an in-depth picture of the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century African America and will be a valuable resource for a new generation of readers.

Download or read book What Was African American Literature written by Kenneth W. Warren and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literatureÑand to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In WarrenÕs view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, WarrenÕs work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

Download or read book Unfettered written by Sutton E. Griggs and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfettered: A Novel (1902) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Sutton’s third novel is a story of violence and forced migration that explores and critiques the politics of liberalism and assimilation in twentieth century America. Although Griggs’ novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era’s most radical literary efforts by an African American writer. When Lemuel Dalton takes control of his father’s estate, he sets out to make a show of force against Samuel, an ex-slave who oversees the Dalton family farm. When a fight breaks out between Lemuel and Harry, Samuel’s son, he shoots the young Black man in cold blood, gravely wounding him. As the threat of an imminent race war increases tensions in the rural Southern community, a group of white men takes advantage of the unrest to lynch and kill Beulah, Samuel’s defiant daughter. When it becomes clear that the state is determined to protect the interests of those in power, the Black community flees en masse to the city. Newlyweds Morlene and Harry—who survived his encounter with Lemuel—set out in search of safety, settling down to start their lives anew. But when Morlene meets Dorlan, a local activist, she begins to have doubts about her marriage. Engaged with some of the leading social issues of its era—American imperialism, lynching, and the movement for economic self-determination in the Black community—Unfettered is a brilliant novel from an underrecognized talent of twentieth century literature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sutton E Griggs’ Unfettered: A Novel is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Download or read book The Invention of Angela Carter written by Edmund Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely acknowledged as one of the most important English writers of the last century, Angela Carter's work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range. Her life was as vigorously modern and unconventional as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself - as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer - and how she came to write such seductive and distinctive masterworks as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children. Because its subject so powerfully embodied the spirit of the times, the book also provides a fresh perspective on Britain's social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines such topics as the 1960s counterculture, the social and imaginative conditions of the nuclear age, and the advent of second wave feminism. Author Edmund Gordon has followed in Angela Carter's footsteps - travelling to the places she lived in Britain, Japan, and the USA - to uncover a life rich in adventure and incident. With unrestricted access to her manuscripts, letters, and journals, and informed by interviews with Carter's friends and family, Gordon offers an unrivalled portrait of one of the twentieth century's most dazzlingly original writers. This sharply written narrative will be the definitive biography for years to come.