Deans and Truants

Deans and Truants
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081220235X

For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.

Representing the Race

Representing the Race
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814743870

The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sortOCopamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novelsOCoto parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack ObamaOCOs creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of whatOCOs at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium."

A Companion to African American Literature

A Companion to African American Literature
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2013-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118651197

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

The Truants

The Truants
Author: Kate Weinberg
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525541985

One of the New York Times Book Review's Top Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 One of USA Today's Best Books 2020 "[A] hypnotic debut. . . .[An] uncommonly clever whodunit."--New York Times Book Review Perfect for lovers of Agatha Christie and The Secret History, The Truants is a seductive, unsettling, and beautifully written debut novel of literary suspense--a thrilling exploration of deceit, first love, and the depths to which obsession can drive us. People disappear when they most want to be seen. Jess Walker has come to a concrete campus under the flat gray skies of East Anglia for one reason: to be taught by the mesmerizing and rebellious Dr. Lorna Clay, whose seminars soon transform Jess's thinking on life, love, and Agatha Christie. Swept up in Lorna's thrall, Jess falls in with a tightly knit group of rule-breakers--Alec, a courageous South African journalist with a nihilistic streak; Georgie, a seductive, pill-popping aristocrat; and Nick, a handsome geologist with layers of his own. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken, until a tragedy shatters their friendships and love affairs, and reveals a terrible secret. Soon Jess must face the question she fears most: what is the true cost of an extraordinary life? An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of January A USA Today Must-Read Book of Winter An Observer Book of the Year (UK) A Marie Claire Top 5 Christmas Read (UK) A Times Best New Crime Novel (UK) A Guardian Top 10 Golden Age Detective Novel An Irish Times Best Debut of 2019 An Apple Books Pick for January

Writing through Jane Crow

Writing through Jane Crow
Author: Ayesha K. Hardison
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2014-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813935946

In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson. By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women’s writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era. A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900

Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900
Author: Elizabeth Renker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019880878X

Examines the works of a diverse range of realist poets to redefine the significance of poetry to the genre of realism during the postbellum period in American literature.

Progress Compromised

Progress Compromised
Author: John L. Glenn
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807169943

In Progress Compromised, John L. Glenn examines how African American literature engages in debates about the political and cultural tensions prompted by black social movements during the 1950s and 1960s. Glenn presents detailed case studies of four major novels that illuminate specific periods crucial in the history of African American political struggles, including campaigns for racial integration, the zenith of the civil rights movement, black nationalism, and the immediate legacy of the civil rights era. His analysis provides a nuanced understanding of black postmodern culture and shows how writers use fiction to postulate new modes of resistance and selfhood that defy societal constraints. In Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, the first black female elevator inspector and her male counterparts reconsider their notions of what progress means for African Americans newly integrated into civil service and mass industry. Alice Walker’s Meridian observes the novel’s title character as she copes with the psychological distress experienced by activists participating in the civil rights movement, emphasizing how they bear the psychic and emotional weight of their struggle for equality. John Oliver Killens’s satire The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd considers class stratification among black communities and social organizations by following the protagonists as they expose the biases of a society women’s group, set against a backdrop of late-1960s black nationalism. Finally, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby concerns members of the post–civil rights generation who struggle to achieve self-renewal through introspection while confronting unresolved issues about racial identity and socioeconomic mobility. Progress Compromised showcases the discourse on black cultural politics circulating within late-twentieth-century African American literature, revealing how postmodern fiction investigates the effects of historical movements on individuals, their respective communities, and their efforts to resist social conformity and retain personal identity.

Minority Reports

Minority Reports
Author: M. Borgstrom
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230109713

Through close readings of texts by African American and women authors, Minority Reports offers a theoretical defense of the use of identity categories in American studies by examining how early American literature not only responds to the social stratification of the nineteenth century but also challenges modern historical conceptions of this era.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190642904

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

Research Guide to American Literature

Research Guide to American Literature
Author: Benjamín Franklin
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438132425

Presents American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary War, including essays, narratives and more.