Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Author: Valerie Smith

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780674800885

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It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.

Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Author: Valerie Smith

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.

From Behind the Veil
From Behind the Veil

Author: Robert B. Stepto

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780252062117

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This pioneering study of Afro-American narrative is far more critical, historical, and textual than biographical, chronological, and atextual. Robert Stepto asserts that Afro-American culture has its store of canonical stories or pregeneric myths, the primary one being the quest for freedom and literacy. This second edition includes a new preface and an afterward entitled "Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives."

Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994
Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994

Author: Cary D. Wintz

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780815322184

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Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

Bodies and Books
Bodies and Books

Author: Gillian Silverman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-07-24

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0812206185

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In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading—and particularly book reading—precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world—an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity—the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Nineteenth-Century Worlds
Nineteenth-Century Worlds

Author: Keith Hanley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 131796893X

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This volume assembles a wide range of studies that together provide—through their interdisciplinary range, international scope, and historical emphases—an original scholarly exploration of one of the most important topics in recent nineteenth-century studies: the emergence in the nineteenth century of forms of global experience that have developed more recently into rapidly expanding processes of globalization and their attendant collisions of race, religion, ethnicity, population groups, natural environments, national will and power. Emphasizing such links between global networks past and present, the essays in this volume engage with the latest work in postcolonial, cosmopolitan, and globalization theory while speaking directly to the most pressing concerns of contemporary geopolitics. Each essay examines specific cultural and historical circumstances in the formation of nineteenth-century worlds from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics, political history, natural history, philosophy, the history of medicine and disease, religious studies, literary criticism, art history, and colonial studies. Detailed in their particular modes of analysis yet integrated into a collective conversation about the nineteenth century’s profound impact on our present worlds, these inquiries also explore the economic, political, and cultural determinants on nineteenth-century types of transnational experience as interweaving forces creating new material frameworks and conceptual models for comprehending major human categories—such as race, gender, subjectivity, and national identity—in global terms. As nineteenth-century global intersections differ in important ways from the shapes of globalization today, however, the essays in this volume generate new ways of understanding emergent patterns of worldwide experience in the age of imperialism and thereby stimulate fresh insights into the dynamics of global formations and conflicts today.