Author : Conseula Francis
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 175 pages
File Size : 49,36 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 1571133259
Examines the major divisions in criticism of this major African American writer, paying particular attention to the way each critical period defines Baldwin and his work for its own purposes.
Author : Erik Redling
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 712 pages
File Size : 44,6 MB
Release : 2022-01-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110587645
The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.
Author : Michele Elam
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 13,26 MB
Release : 2015-04-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316240096
This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a 'spokesman for the race', although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. Individual essays examine his classic novels and nonfiction as well as his work across lesser-examined domains: poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy, and artistic collaboration. In doing so, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin captures the power and influence of his work during the civil rights era as well as his relevance in the 'post-race' transnational twenty-first century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership, and country assume new urgency.
Author : Susan J. McWilliams
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 437 pages
File Size : 17,75 MB
Release : 2017-11-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0813169925
In seminal works such as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time, acclaimed author and social critic James Baldwin (1924–1987) expresses his profound belief that writers have the power to transform society, to engage the public, and to inspire and channel conversation to achieve lasting change. While Baldwin is best known for his writings on racial consciousness and injustice, he is also one of the country's most eloquent theorists of democratic life and the national psyche. In A Political Companion to James Baldwin, a group of prominent scholars assess the prolific author's relevance to present-day political challenges. Together, they address Baldwin as a democratic theorist, activist, and citizen, examining his writings on the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women's rights. They investigate the ways in which his work speaks to and galvanizes a collective American polity, and explore his views on the political implications of individual experience in relation to race and gender. This volume not only considers Baldwin's works within their own historical context, but also applies the author's insights to recent events such as the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing his faith in the connections between the past and present. These incisive essays will encourage a new reading of Baldwin that celebrates his significant contributions to political and democratic theory.
Author : Marcus A. Hunter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 46,37 MB
Release : 2018-07-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0429018053
The New Black Sociologists follows in the footsteps of 1974’s pioneering text Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, by tracing the organization of its forbearer in key thematic ways. This new collection of essays revisit the legacies of significant Black scholars including James E. Blackwell, William Julius Wilson, Joyce Ladner, and Mary Pattillo, but also extends coverage to include overlooked figures like Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin and August Wilson - whose lives and work have inspired new generations of Black sociologists on contemporary issues of racial segregation, feminism, religiosity, class, inequality and urban studies.
Author : James Baldwin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 10,31 MB
Release : 2011-09-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0307275965
From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume. “An absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s time—and of him.” —New York Review of Books James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.”
Author : Douglas Field
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 15,69 MB
Release : 2015-06-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0199384169
Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwin's personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin's geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themes-the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism-to bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.
Author : Valérie K. Orlando
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 18,11 MB
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1498567045
This volume of essays explores what it is that has brought marginalized and often exiled writers, seen as treacherous, alienated, and/or queer by their societies and nations together by way of Paris. Spanning from the inter-war period of the late 1920s to the present millennium, this volume considers many seminal questions that have influenced and continue to shape the realm of exiled writers who have sought refuge in Paris in order to write. Additionally, the volume’s essays seek to define alienation and marginalization as not solely subscribing to any single denominator -- sexual preference, gender, or nationality-- but rather as shared modes of being that allow authors to explore what it is to write from abroad in a place that is foreign yet freed of the constrictions of one’s home space. What makes Paris a particularly fruitful space that has allowed these authors and their writings to cross national, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic boundaries for over a century? What is it that brings together writers such as Moroccan Abdellah Taïa, Americans James Baldwin, Richard Wright and, most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Shay Youngblood, Algerian Nabile Farès, Franco-Algerian Leila Sebbar, Canadian Nancy Huston, French Jean Genet and French-Vietnamese Linda Lê? How do their representations and understanding of transgression and marginalization transcend national, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, leading ultimately to revolution, both literary and literal? How does their writing help us to trace the history of Paris as a literary and artistic capital that has been useful for authors’ exploration of the Self, race and home country? These are but a few of the many questions explored in this volume. This book relies on an inherently intersectional approach, which is not based in reified identities, whether they be LGBT, postcolonial, ethnic, national, or linguistic. Instead, we posit that, for example, queer theory, and a “politics of difference”i can help us investigate the dynamics of these multiple identity positions, and hence provide a broader understanding of the lived experiences of these writers, and, perhaps, their readers from the early 1940s to the present.
Author : Emmanuel S. Nelson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 1119 pages
File Size : 26,82 MB
Release : 2015-02-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
Unlike any other book of its kind, this volume celebrates published works from a broad range of American ethnic groups not often featured in the typical canon of literature. This culturally rich encyclopedia contains 160 alphabetically arranged entries on African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American literary traditions, among others. The book introduces the uniquely American mosaic of multicultural literature by chronicling the achievements of American writers of non-European descent and highlighting the ethnic diversity of works from the colonial era to the present. The work features engaging topics like the civil rights movement, bilingualism, assimilation, and border narratives. Entries provide historical overviews of literary periods along with profiles of major authors and great works, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maya Angelou, Sherman Alexie, A Raisin in the Sun, American Born Chinese, and The House on Mango Street. The book also provides concise overviews of genres not often featured in textbooks, like the Chinese American novel, African American young adult literature, Mexican American autobiography, and Cuban American poetry.
Author : Hugh McIntosh
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 22,60 MB
Release : 2018-09-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813941660
Guilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and informed America’s cultural insecurity. This became a matter of nationhood as well as aesthetics: the amateurism of popular narratives resonated with the discourse of new nationhood. In Guilty Pleasures, Hugh McIntosh examines reactions to best-selling fiction in the United States from 1850 to 1920, including reader response to such best-sellers as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, and Trilby as well as fictional representations—from Trollope to Baldwin—of American culture’s lack of artistic greatness. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of contemporary criticism, urban display, parody, and advertising, Guilty Pleasures thoroughly documents how the conflicted attitude toward popular novels shaped these ephemeral modes of response. Paying close attention to this material history of novel reading, McIntosh reveals how popular fiction’s unique status as socially saturating and aesthetically questionable inspired public reflection on what it meant to belong to a flawed national community.
