The Bloodworth Orphans


Book Description

Leon Forrest, acclaimed author of Divine Days, uses a remarkable verbal intensity to evoke human tragedy, injustice, and spirituality in his writing. As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in a novel that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.




"In the Light of Likeness-transformed"


Book Description

""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




Playing the Changes


Book Description

A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.




Leon Forrest


Book Description

Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations combines biography and various methods of critical analysis to interpret the work of this important African-American novelist and essayist, who critics have compared to Joyce, Faulkner, and Tolstoy. Highly praised by Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, Forrest's four novels present a remarkably rich and engaging view of contemporary African-American urban culture and its roots in the southern past. The book includes a general introduction which surveys Forrest's life and presents an interpretation of the unity of his fiction, as well as individual essays offering different interpretations of Forrest's four major novels, three interviews with the writer, and a detailed chronology and bibliography.




Fingering the Jagged Grain


Book Description

In Fingering the Jagged Grain, Keith E. Byerman discusses how black writers such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines have moved away from the ideological rigidity of the black arts movement that arose in the 1960s to create a more expressive, imaginative, and artistic fiction inspired by the example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Combining a strong concern for technique and craftsmanship with elements of African American heritage including jazz, blues, spirituals, cautionary tales, and voodoo, these writers have created a vital fiction that celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful details and brutal episodes of black experience.




Meteor in the Madhouse


Book Description

"Five interconnected novellas framed by an account of the last days in the life of playwright Joubert Antoine Jones."--Jacket.




Multicultural American Literature


Book Description

Table of contents




Making home


Book Description

Making home explores the figure of the orphan child in a broad selection of contemporary US novels by popular and critically acclaimed authors Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Toni Morrison. The orphan child is a continuous presence in US literature, not only in children’s books and nineteenth-century texts, but also in a variety of genres of contemporary fiction for adults. Making home examines the meanings of this figure in the contexts of American literary history, social history and ideologies of family, race and nation. It argues that contemporary orphan characters function as links to literary history and national mythologies, even as they may also serve to critique the limits of literary history, as well as the limits of familial and national belonging.




A History of the African American Novel


Book Description

This History is intended for a broad audience seeking knowledge of how novels interact with and influence their cultural landscape. Its interdisciplinary approach will appeal to those interested in novels and film, graphic novels, novels and popular culture, transatlantic blackness, and the interfacing of race, class, gender, and aesthetics.




The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel


Book Description

This Companion presents new essays covering the one hundred and fifty year history of the African American novel.




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