Catalog Search Results
Author
Summary
Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as "a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race, " and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and...
Author
Summary
"Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a classic work of American literature that explores the harsh realities of slavery in the nineteenth century. Published in 1852, the novel follows the lives of several characters, including the titular character Tom, a long-suffering slave on a plantation in Kentucky. Through the characters' stories, Stowe paints a vivid picture of life in slavery, as well as its psychological, emotional, and spiritual...
Author
Series
Summary
This title explores the creative works of famous author Toni Morrison. Works analyzed include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula, and Paradise. Clear, comprehensive text gives background biographical information of Morrison. The "You Critique It" feature invites readers to analyze other creative works on their own. A table of contents, timeline, list of works, resources, source notes, glossary, and an index are also included. Essential Critiques is a series...
Author
Summary
"During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers-enslaved and free-allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. They borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism-its lyric poetry, prophetic visions-to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. Authors like Frances Ellen...
Author
Summary
"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
Author
Summary
In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Formats
Summary
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...
Author
Summary
Home is a powerful metaphor guiding the literature of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have given considerable attention to the Great Migration and the role of the northern city as well as to the place of the South in African American literature, few have given specific notice to the site of "home." And in the twenty years since Houston A. Baker Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature appeared, no one...
Author
Summary
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield...
Author
Summary
"How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi,...