Download or read book Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban written by James W. Coleman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Tempest's Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype in the modern era depicting black men as slaves and savages who threaten civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into modern-day Calibans. Coleman analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. He traces the Caliban legacy to early literary influences, primarily Ralph Ellison, and then deftly demonstrates its contemporary manifestations. This engaging study challenges those who argue for the liberating possibilities of the postmodern narrative, as Coleman reveals the pervasiveness and influence of Calibanic discourse. At the heart of James Coleman's study is the perceived history of the black male in Western culture and the traditional racist stereotypes indigenous to the language. Calibanic discourse, Coleman argues, so deeply and subconsciously influences the texts of black male writers that they are unable to cast off the oppression inherent in this discourse. Coleman wants to change the perception of black male writers' struggle with oppression by showing that it is their special struggle with language. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban is the first book to analyze a substantial body of black male fiction from a central perspective.
Download or read book Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature written by Jeffrey B. Leak and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The portrayal of black men in our national literature is controversial, complex, and often contradictory."In Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, Jeffrey B. Leak identifies some of the long-held myths and stereotypes that persist in the work of black writers from the nineteenth century to the present--intellectual inferiority, criminality, sexual prowess, homosexual emasculation, and cultural deprivation. Utilizing Robert B. Stepto's call-and-response theory, Leak studies four pairs of novels within the context of certain myths, identifying the literary tandems between them and seeking to discover the source of our culture's psychological preoccupation with black men. Calling upon interdisciplinary fields of study--literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, legal theory, and queer theory--Leak offers ground breaking analysis of both canonical texts (representing the "call" of the call-and-response dyad) and texts by emerging writers (representing the "response"), including Frederick Douglass and Charles Johnson: Ralph Ellison and Brent Wade; Richard Wright and Ernest J. Gaines; and Toni Morrison and David Bradley. Though Leak does not claim that the "response" tests are superior to the "call' texts, he does argue that, in some cases, the newer work--such as charles Johnson's "Oxherding Tale--can address a theme or offer a narrative innovation not found in preceding texts, such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. In these instances, argues Leak, the newer texts constitute not only a response to the call text, but a substantial revision. Leak offers the first in-depth criticism of black masculinity in a range of literary texts. In a final chapter, he expands his discussion to the emerging field of black masculinity studies, pointing to future directions for study, including memoir, film, drama, and others. Poised on the brink of exciting new trends in scholarship, "Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature is flagship work, enhancing the understanding of literary constructions of black masculinity and the larger cultural imperatives to which these writers are reacting.
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction written by Darryl Dickson-Carr and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-14 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.
Download or read book The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry written by Keith Clark and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This welcome study delivers a long-overdue analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908–1997), a major mid-twentieth-century African American author. Primarily known as the sole female member of the “Wright School of Social Protest,” Petry has been most recognized for her 1946 novel The Street, about a woman’s struggle to raise her son in a hardscrabble Harlem neighborhood. Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a sort of literary descendent of Richard Wright to acclaim her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry’s three novels and collection of short stories. Clark explores, for example, Petry’s use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He also identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in her startling depictions of race, class, gender construction, and sexual identity in the stories “The Bones of Louella Brown” and “The Witness.” Petry’s overlooked second novel, Country Place—set in a deceptively serene, bucolic Connecticut hamlet—camouflages a world as palsied and nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry’s writing, Clark also assesses the writer’s representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors—some socially sanctioned, others transgressive and taboo—in her unheralded masterpiece, The Narrows, and her widely anthologized short story, “Like a Winding Sheet.” Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry foregrounds and analyzes Petry’s unique concerns and agile techniques, re-introducing and situating her among more celebrated male contemporaries.
Download or read book The Eve Hagar Paradigm in the Fiction of Quince Duncan written by Dellita Martin-Ogunsola and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this first book-length study in English devoted to Duncan's work, Martin-Ogunsola explores the issues of race, class, and gender in five of Duncan's major works published during the 1970s. Focusing primarily on the roles of women, Martin-Ogunsola uses the figures of Eve and the Egyptian slave Hagar to provide, through metaphor, an in-depth analysis of the female characters portrayed in Duncan's prose. Specifically, the Eve/Hagar paradigm is employed to examine how the essential characteristics of femininity play out in the context of ethnicity and caste. The book begins with Dawn Song (1970), the story of Antillean immigrants struggling with migration, oppression, and resistance while adapting to a new environment, and continues through Dead-End Street (1979), a novel exploring the ramifications of the myths, perpetuated through history, that defines Costa Rica in terms of Euro-Hispanic culture." "Martin-Ogunsola illustrates Duncan's use of a female presence that challenges the traditional treatment of women in literature. Spanning the period between the initial settlement of the Atlantic region of Costa Rica during the early years of the twentieth century to the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War, Martin-Ogunsola's book invites the reader to view the world through the eyes of Duncan's female characters." "The Eve/Hagar Paradigm in the Fiction of Quince Duncan examines some of the most compiling issues of contemporary Latin American literature and illustrates how a prominent Costa Rican writer deconstructs the stereotype of woman as wife/lover/slave. In the process, Duncan finds his own voice. Exposing aspects of Costa Rican society that have historically been kept in the shadows, this volume makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Latin American literary canon."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Download or read book The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture written by Karen Dillon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently offer the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikeness--standing side by side, speaking and acting in unison. Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines the historical narrative--within the discourses of experimentation, aberrance and eugenics--and how it has shaped their representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945 written by John N. Duvall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive 2011 guide to the genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors of American fiction since the Second World War.
Download or read book Black Frankenstein written by Elizabeth Young and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-08-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.
Download or read book Anxious Men written by Clive Baldwin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a complex and contentious period that was formative in shaping American society and culture in the twentieth century, this book sheds new light on the ways in which fiction engaged with contemporary notions of masculinity.
Download or read book Prophetic Remembrance written by Erica Still and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the term "prophetic remembrance" to articulate the expression of a constituent faith in the performative capacity of language, Erica Still shows how black subjectivity is born of and interprets cultural trauma. She brings together African American neo-slave narratives and Black South African postapartheid narratives to reveal the processes by which black subjectivity accounts for its traumatic origins, names the therapeutic work of the present, and inscribes the possibility of the future. The author draws on trauma studies, black theology, and literary criticism as she considers how writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, David Bradley, Sindiwe Magona, K. Sello Duiker, and Zakes Mda explore the possibilities for rehearsing a traumatic past without being overcome by it. Although both African American and South African literary studies have addressed questions of memory, narrative, and trauma, little comparative work has been done. Prophetic Remembrance offers this comparative focus in reading these literatures together to address the question of what it means to remember and to recover from racial oppression.
Download or read book African American Literature written by Hans Ostrom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.
Download or read book All Stories Are True written by Tracie Church Guzzio and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. Guzzio argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman's work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman's personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman remains under-studied. Of particular value is Guzzio's analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman's challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, and his allowing past, present, and future time to remain fluid in the narratives, Guzzio finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.
Download or read book Authority of Expression in Early Modern England written by Nely Keinänen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authority of Expression in Early Modern England brings together an international group of scholars writing on the relationships between authority and the self in early modern English literature, discussing writers such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and Andrew Marvell. The early modern period was a time of momentous religious, political and cultural change, with scientific and geographical exploration opening new horizons, challenging established truths, and unsettling the concepts and practices of authority. In this book, scholars approach the texts from a literary, historical and/or linguistic point of view, thus providing multiple perspectives on the topic. Themes explored include the links between sense perception and cognition in the establishment of authority; the ways that sexuality, gender relations and language are implicated in expressing and responding to authority; and conceptions of the self and the strategies that individuals adopt to cope with changes in their frameworks of authority and power. This wide-ranging collection offers new perspectives on how authority was negotiated in the English Renaissance.
Download or read book Culturally Responsive Reading written by Durthy A. Washington and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A book that is brilliantly incisive and generative beyond words, Culturally Responsive Reading is a gift that will be welcomed in classrooms everywhere.” —Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her Help students to explore the intertextuality of literature and to think more deeply and compassionately about the world. This book shows high school teachers and college instructors how to foreground a work’s cultural context, recognizing that every culture has its own narrative tradition of oral and written classics that inform its literature. The author introduces readers to the LIST Paradigm, a guided approach to culturally responsive reading that encourages readers to access and analyze a text by asking significant questions designed to foster close, critical reading. By combining aspects of both literary analysis (exploring the elements of fiction such as plot, setting, and character) and literary criticism (exploring works from multiple perspectives such as historical, psychological, and archetypal), the LIST Paradigm helps educators “unlock” literature with four keys to culture: Language, Identity, Space, and Time. In Culturally Responsive Reading, Washington exposes cultural myths, reveals racist and culturally biased language, dismantles stereotypes, and prevents the egregious misreading of works written by people of color. Book Features: Describes a unique approach to culturally responsive reading, including specific teaching strategies and rich classroom examples.Explores numerous texts by writers of color that are rarely included as required reading in literature courses.Provides examples and illustrations of innovative ways to incorporate multicultural texts into an introductory literature course.Incorporates epigraphs and questions that highlight each component of the LIST approach.Includes a critical essay that guides teachers through the process of teaching a complex postmodern novel (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).
Download or read book Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story written by Jeff Birkenstein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.
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 Faithful Vision written by James W. Coleman and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a marvelous and sustained discussion of 'faithful vision' and its significant influence on African American literature." -- American Literature In Faithful Vision, James W. Coleman places under his critical lens a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally. The Judeo-Christian tradition, according to Coleman, is the primary component of the African American spiritual perspective, though its syncretism with voodoo/hoodoo -- a religion transported from West Africa through the West Indies and New Orleans to the rest of black America -- also figures largely. Reviewing novels written mainly since 1950 by writers including James Baldwin, Randall Kenan, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Erna Brodber, and Ishmael Reed, among others, Coleman explores how black authors have addressed the relevance of faith, especially as it relates to an oppressive Christian tradition. He shows that their novels -- no matter how critical of the sacred or supernatural, or how skeptical the characters' viewpoints -- ultimately never reject the vision of faith. With its focus on religious experience and tradition and its wider discussion of history, philosophy, gender, and postmodernism, Faithful Vision brings a bold critical dimension to African American literary studies. "An insightful interrogation of the complexities of religious discourse in the African American literary tradition. Because it superbly translates complex spiritual ethos into literary tradition, this remarkable book is a must for anyone interested in intersections of the sacred and the secular in black cultural productions." -- Southern Literary Journal "Faithful Vision both looks intently into faith and shows us how to look." -- Christianity and Literature
