Download or read book Contemporary African American Literature written by Lovalerie King and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring contemporary black fiction and examining important issues in current African American literary studies. In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others. The collection is bracketed by a foreword by novelist and graphic artist Mat Johnson, one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary African American writers, and an afterword by Alice Randall, author of the controversial parody The Wind Done Gone. Together, King and Moody-Turner make the case that diversity, innovation, and canon expansion are essential to maintaining the vitality of African American literary studies. “A compelling collection of essays on the ongoing relevance of African American literature to our collective understanding of American history, society, and culture. Featuring a wide array of writers from all corners of the literary academy, the book will have national appeal and offer strategies for teaching African American literature in colleges and universities across the country.” —Gene Jarrett, Boston University “[This book describes] a fruitful tension that brings scholars of major reputation together with newly emerging critics to explore the full range of literary activities that have flourished in the post-Civil Rights era. Notable are such popular influences as hip-hop music and Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.” —American Literary Scholarship, 2013

Download or read book Reading Contemporary African American Literature written by Beauty Bragg and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

Download or read book How to Read African American Literature written by Aida Levy-Hussen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.

Download or read book Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers written by Jean Wyatt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.

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 Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Keith Eldon Byerman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

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 Reading Contemporary African American Drama written by Trudier Harris and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Textbook

Download or read book In the Light of Likeness transformed written by Dana A. Williams and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""In the Light of Likeness - transformed" by Dana A. Williams looks critically at the work of contemporary African American author Leon Forrest. Not only does she bring to the critical table a well-known but as yet understudied modernist author - an important endeavor in and of itself - but she also explores Forrest's novels' cultural dialogue with black ethnic culture and other African American authors, as well as provides in-depth readings of his prose and interpretations of his narrative style." "Forrest's highly experimental narrative style, his reinterpretation of modernism, and his transformations of black cultural traditions into literary aesthetics often pose challenges of interpretation for the reader and the scholar alike. As the first single-authored book-length study of Forrest's novel, this book offers readers pathways into his fiction. What this culturalist approach to the novels reveals is that Forrest's fiction was foremost concerned with investigating ways for the African American to survive in the contemporary moment. Through a variety of characters, the novels reveal the African American's art of transformation - the ability to find ways to make the wretchedness of the past work in positive ways."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms written by N. K. Jemisin and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

Download or read book Forgotten Readers written by Elizabeth McHenry and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-31 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVRecovers the history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American reading societies./div

Download or read book The Contemporary African American Novel written by Bernard W. Bell and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published "The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition", a comprehensive interpretive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. This is a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001.

Download or read book Freedom Readers written by Dennis Looney and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy is a literary-historical study of the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy have assumed a position of importance in African American culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the late 1820s to the present. In many ways, the African American reception of Dante follows a recognizable narrative of reception: the Romantic rehabilitation of the author; the late-nineteenth-century glorification of Dante as a radical writer of reform; the twentieth-century modernist rewriting; and the adaptation of the Divine Comedy into the prose of the contemporary novel. But surely it is unique to African American rewritings of Dante to suggest that the Divine Comedy is itself a kind of slave narrative. Only African American "translations" of Dante use the medieval author to comment on segregation, migration, and integration. While many authors over the centuries have learned to articulate a new kind of poetry from Dante's example, for African American authors attuned to the complexities of Dante's hybrid vernacular, his poetic language becomes a model for creative expression that juxtaposes and blends classical notes and the vernacular counterpoint in striking ways. Looney demonstrates this appropriation of Dante as a locus for black agency in the creative work of such authors as William Wells Brown, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and the filmmaker Spencer Williams. Looney fruitfully suggests that we read Dante's Divine Comedy with its African American rewritings in mind, to assess their effect on our interpretation of the Comedy and, in turn, on our understanding of African American culture.

Download or read book African American Literature written by Demetrice A. Worley and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages. This book was released on 1998 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of eighty-five selections that exemplify the range and depth of the writing of Africian Americans. f.

Download or read book Ulysses in Black written by Patrice D. Rankine and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Download or read book New Bones written by Kevin Everod Quashie and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 1160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inclusive multi-genre anthology of late 20th century African-American literature.

Download or read book Depictions of Home in African American Literature written by Trudier Harris and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.