Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin

Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin
Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1987-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780870495342

In James Baldwin's fiction, according to Trudier Harris, black women are conceptually limited figures until their author ceases to measure them by standards of the community fundamentalist church. Harris analyzes works written over a thirty-year period to show how Baldwin's development of female character progresses through time. Black women in the early fiction, responding to their elders as well as to religious influences, see their lives in terms of duty as wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. Failure in any of these roles leads to guilt feelings and the expectation of damnation. In later works, Baldwin adopts a new point of view, acknowledging complex extenuating circumstances in lieu of pronouncing moral judgement. Female characters in works written at this stage eventually come to believe that the church affords no comfort. Baldwin subsequently makes villains of some female churchgoers, and caring women who do not attend church become his most attractive characters. Still later in Baldwin's career, a woman who frees herself of guilt by moving completely beyond the church attains greater contentment than almost all of her counterparts in the earlier works.

Going to Meet the Man

Going to Meet the Man
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804149755

A major collection of short stories by one of America’s most important writers—informed by the knowledge the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators. • “If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winner of The English Patient In this modern classic, "there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

Just Above My Head

Just Above My Head
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Delta
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2000-06-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385334567

James Baldwin’s final novel is “the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers” (The New York Times Book Review). “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, James Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses—and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

Another Country

Another Country
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2001-09-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141186372

After Rufus Scott, an embittered and unemployed black jazz-musician commits suicide, his sister Ida and old friend Vivaldo become lovers. Yet their feelings for each other are complicated by Rufus's friends, especially the homosexual actor Eric Jones who has been Vivaldo's lover.

A Study Guide for James Baldwin's "The Amen Corner"

A Study Guide for James Baldwin's
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 27
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1410339726

A Study Guide for James Baldwin's "The Amen Corner," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

James Baldwin's Later Fiction

James Baldwin's Later Fiction
Author: Lynn O. Scott
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2002-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0870139541

James Baldwin’s Later Fiction examines the decline of Baldwin’s reputation after the middle 1960s, his tepid reception in mainstream and academic venues, and the ways in which critics have often mis-represented and undervalued his work. Scott develops readings of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head that explore the interconnected themes in Baldwin’s work: the role of the family in sustaining the arts, the price of success in American society, and the struggle of black artists to change the ways that race, sex, and masculinity are represented in American culture. Scott argues that Baldwin’s later writing crosses the cultural divide between the 1950s and 1960s in response to the civil rights and black power movements. Baldwin’s earlier works, his political activism and sexual politics, and traditions of African American autobiography and fiction all play prominent roles in Scott’s analysis.

Geographies of Relation

Geographies of Relation
Author: Theresa Delgadillo
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472904574

Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

Re-viewing James Baldwin

Re-viewing James Baldwin
Author: Daniel Quentin Miller
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781566397377

This new collection of essays presents a critical reappraisal of James Baldwin's work, looking beyond the commercial and critical success of some of Baldwin's early writings such as Go Tell it on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son. Focusing on Baldwin's critically undervalued early works and the virtually neglected later ones, the contributors illuminate little-known aspects of this daring author's work and highlight his accomplishments as an experimental writer. Attentive to his innovations in style and form, Things Not Seen reveals an author who continually challenged cultural norms and tackled matters of social justice, sexuality, and racial identity. As volume editor D. Quentin Miller notes, "what has been lost is a complete portrait of [Baldwin's] tremendously rich intellectual journey that illustrates the direction of African-American thought and culture in the late twentieth century." This is an important book for anyone interested in Baldwin's work. It will engage readers interested in literature and African-American Studies. Author note: D. Quentin Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN.

11 Practice Tests for the SAT and PSAT, 2014 Edition

11 Practice Tests for the SAT and PSAT, 2014 Edition
Author: Princeton Review
Publisher: Princeton Review
Total Pages: 962
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 0307946169

THE PRINCETON REVIEW GETS RESULTS. Get all the prep you need to ace the SAT and PSAT with 11 full-length practice tests, comprehensive explanations for every question, and helpful scoring grids and admissions advice. "Inside the Book: All the Practice You Need" - 11 full-length practice tests (10 for the SAT, 1 for the PSAT) - Tips and advice for the SAT, including the Writing section - Answers and detailed explanations to help you learn from your mistakes - Practice that replicates the real test and covers all sections: Math, Reading, and Writing - Expert admissions advice in a new section, the "SAT Insider"

11 Practice Tests for the SAT and PSAT 2012

11 Practice Tests for the SAT and PSAT 2012
Author: Princeton Review (Firm)
Publisher: Princeton Review
Total Pages: 946
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: Educational tests and measurements
ISBN: 0375428372

A guide for students preparing for the SAT and PSAT furnishes eleven full-length sample exams, along with detailed explanations of the answers.