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These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.
Afro-Americans of the nineteenth century are the invisible poets of our national literature. This anthology brings together 171 poems by 35 poets, from the best known to the unknown, in one volume.
A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, ...
Offers a critical history of African American poetry from the transatlantic slave trade to present day hip-hop.
Bruce's engaging history traces the origins and context of African American literature, highlighting key influences, rather than surveying all the examples. Among the influences discussed are English literary conventions, the writing of Phillis Wheatley, the development of an authoritative black persona and perspective, and the rise of immediatist abolition. Bruce teaches history at the U. of California, Irvine. c. Book News Inc.
The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebrat...
Originally published in 1999 Black Writers Abroad puts forward the theory that African American literature was born, partially within the context of a people and its writers who lived, for the most part, in slavery and bondage prior to the Civil War. It is an in-depth study of black American writers who, left the United States as expatriates. The book discusses the people that left, where they went, why they left and why they did or did not return, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. It seeks to explain the impact exile had upon these authors’ literary work and careers, as well as upon African American literary history.
"In Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, Virginia Jackson argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. This is not a history of American poetry that begins with the Puritans and stretches to the present, or that jumps from the British Romantics to Walt Whitman, or that restricts the influence of African American poetry to a separate tradition; instead, this book emphasizes the many ways in which early Black poets invented what Phillis Wheatley Peters called "the deep design" of American lyric. Through readings of the poetics of Wheatley Peters, Ge...
Through a series of essays that explore the forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, major authors, and latest critical approaches, A Companion to African American Literature presents a comprehensive chronological overview of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the modern day Examines African American literature from its earliest origins, through the rise of antislavery literature in the decades leading into the Civil War, to the modern development of contemporary African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political ideologies Addresses the latest critical and scholarly approaches to African American literature Features essays by leading established literary scholars as well as newer voices