Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Achebe Dumas written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the authors and writings covered in Gale's Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past 200 Years (1992) and its one-volume supplement (1998) were published prior to 1950, hence this new set of three volumes focusing on African-American (and some African and Caribbean) writers and works published since 1950. It includes coverage of 80 writers whose works are considered canon and have therefore been subjected to major critiques, as well as writers who have appeared in major anthologies and encyclopedias of African American literature. Each author entry includes an introduction that covers biographical details, the major literary interests of the author, descriptions and summaries of the author's best known works, and critical commentary about the author's achievement, status, and importance; a chronological list of principal works; and multiple excerpts of criticism, including book reviews, academic studies of individual works, and comparative studies, arranged chronologically to give a sense of how critical reception evolved over time; and, finally, a further reading list. Also included are author, nationality, and title indexes, comprehensive for these volumes together with the predecessors mentioned above. Annotation.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Achebe Dumas written by Jelena O. Krstovic and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 2008 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on writers and works published since 1950. The majority of the authors surveyed are African American, but representative African and Caribbean authors are also included.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Achebe Ellison written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theory of African Literature written by Chidi Amuta and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking work, first published in 1989, was one of the first to challenge the conventional critical assessment of African literature, and remains highly influential today. Amuta's key argument is that African literature can be discussed only within the wider framework of the dismantling of colonial rule and Western hegemony in Africa. In exploring the possibility of a dialectical, alternative critical base, he draws upon both classical Marxist aesthetics and the theories of African culture espoused by Fanon, Cabral and Ngugi. From these explorations, Amuta derives a new language of criticism, which is then applied to works by modern African writers as diverse as Achebe, Ousmane, Agostinho Neto and Dennis Brutus. Amuta's highly original and innovative approach remains relevant not only for assessing the literature of developing countries, but for Marxist and postcolonial theories of literary criticism more generally. The author's elegance of argument and clarity of exposition makes this a distinguished and lasting contribution to debates around cultural expression in postcolonial Africa.
Download or read book A Spirit of Dialogue written by Christopher N. Okonkwo and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking study, A Spirit of Dialogue examines through extensive, interdisciplinary research, theory, and close reading the intricate reconstructions, extensions, and resonances of the West African myth of spirit children, the "Born-to-Die," in contemporary African American neo-slave narratives. Arguing that the myth, called "Ogbañje" in Igbo language and "àbíkú" in Yoruba, has had over thirty years of uncharted presence in African American literature, Okonkwo advances a compelling case absent in extant scholarship. He traces Ogbañje/the Born-to-Die's appearance in African American texts to a convergence of factors. They include but are not limited to: the impact of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; the 1960s emergence of the contemporary neo-slave narrative; the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness/Black Power movement and the cultural agenda, gendered politics, and centripetal philosophy of the Black Arts movement's nationalist aesthetic; African American identity questions of the post-civil rights and the multicultural eras; and the thematic shifts, as well as the African diaspora orientation of African American fiction of the post-nationalist aesthetic period. A Spirit of Dialogue focuses on the sometimes neglected and understudied works of four canonical African American writers: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Tananarive Due's The Between, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Okonkwo demonstrates persuasively how the mythic spirit child informs the content and form of these novels, offering Butler, Due, Wideman, and Morrison a non-occidental "code" by which to engage collectively with the various issues integral to the history experience of African-descended people. The paradigm functions, then, as the nexus of a life-affirmative dialogue among the six novels, as well as between them and other works of African religious and literary imagination, particularly Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road.
Download or read book Black Literature and Literary Theory written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms. This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism written by Jelena O. Krstovic and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 2008 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on writers and works published since 1950. The majority of the authors surveyed are African American, but representative African and Caribbean authors are also included.
Download or read book African Literature and Social Change written by Olakunle George and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts.” —Neil ten Kortenaar, author of Debt, Law, Realism Alert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together—writings by little-known black missionaries, so called “black whitemen,” and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers—Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism. “A bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.” —Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste “A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George’s African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it.” —Comparative Literature Studies
Download or read book South of Tradition written by Trudier Harris and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 up-and-coming writers such as Randall Kenan and less-known writers such as Brent Wade and Henry Dumas. Harris-Lopez addresses themes of sexual and racial identity, reconceptualizations of and transcendence of Christianity, analyses of African American folk and cultural traditions, and issues of racial justice. Many of her subjects argue that geography shapes identity, whether that geography is the European territory many blacks escaped to from the oppressive South, or the South itself, where generations of African Americans have had to come to grips with their relationship to the land and its history. For Harris-Lopez, "south of tradition" refers both to geography and to readings of texts that are not in keeping with expected responses to the works. She explains her point of departure for the essays as "a slant, an angle, or a jolt below the line of what would be considered the norm for usual responses to African American literature." The scope of Harris-Lopez's work is tremendous. From her coverage of noncanonical writers to her analysis of humor in the best-selling The Color Purple, she provides essential material that should inform all future readings of African American literature.
Download or read book African American Literary Theory written by Winston Napier and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-one essays by writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as critics and academics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examine the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. Contributions are organized chronologically beginning with the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Black Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Black Literature in America written by Houston A. Baker (Jr.) and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages. This book was released on 1971 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 2011-05-03 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 literature—and 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 Warren’s 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, Warren’s 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 New Directions in African Literature written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume ask what are the new directions of African literature? What should be the major concerns of writers, critics and teachers in the twenty-first century? What are the accomplishments and legacies? What gaps remain to be filled, and what challenges are there to be addressed by publishers and the book industry? What are the implications for pedagogy in the new technological era? ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. North America: Africa World Press; Nigeria: HEBN
Download or read book Figures in Black written by Henry Louis Gates (Jr.) and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Black literature cannot be characterized strictly as social realism, and offers a textual analysis of works by eighteenth- to twentieth-century Black writers.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism written by James P. Draper and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 1992 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.1 Achebe - Ellison -- V.2 Emecheta - Malcolm X. -- V.3 Marshall - Young, Indexes.
Download or read book The Signifying Monkey written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative" and in The Washington Post Book World as "brilliantly original," Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey is a groundbreaking work that illuminates the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature. It elaborates a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. Exploring the process of signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. This superb 25th-Anniversary Edition features a new preface by Gates that reflects on the impact of the book and its relevance for today's society as well as a new afterword written by noted critic W. T. J. Mitchell.
Download or read book Goatskin Bags and Wisdom written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Among the contributors are a new generation of young African writers whose studies include the works of a number of established and emerging African Writers about whom there is little criticism now in existence."--BOOK JACKET.
