Given the rise of new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to African American and Black Atlantic studies, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative will offer a fresh, wide-ranging assessment of this major American literary genre. The volume will begin with articles that consider the fundamental concerns of gender, sexuality, community, and the Christian ethos of suffering and redemption that are central to any understanding of slave narratives. The chapters that follow will interrogate the various agendas behind the production of both pre- and post-Emancipation narratives and take up the various interpretive problems they pose. Strategic omissions and veiled gestures were often necessary in these life accounts as they revealed disturbing, too-painful truths, far beyond what white audiences were prepared to hear. While touching upon the familiar canonical autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the Handbook will pay more attention to the under-studied narratives of Josiah Henson, Sojourner Truth, William Grimes, Henry Box Brown, and other often-overlooked accounts. In addition to the literary autobiographies of bondage, the volume will anatomize the powerful WPA recordings of interviews with former slaves during the late 1930s. With essays on the genre's imaginative afterlife, its final essays will chart the emergence and development of neoslave narratives, most notably in Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Toni Morrisons's Beloved and Octavia Butler's provocative science fiction novel, Kindred. In short, the Handbook will provide a long-overdue assessment of the state of the genre and the vital scholarship that continues to grow around it, work that is offering some of the most provocative analysis emerging out of the literary studies discipline as a whole.
The first two options fit neatly within Orlando Patterson's paradigm of slavery, in which flight and physical death offer the only true respites from social death. The third option, escape through madness, appears less a true escape ...
This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective-in Africa, England, and the Americas.
A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.
The author discusses the writings of Richard Allen, Solomon Bayley, Henry Bibb, Henry Box Brown, John Brown, Leonard Black, William Wells Brown, Lewis Clarke, William Craft, Frederick Douglass, Martin R....
In collecting some of the most authoritative statements about the science of economics and its concepts in the African context, this handbook (the first of two volumes) opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on exciting topics, and in ...
... can be found in the work of Theodore Walker Jr. In Mothership Connections: A Black Atlantic Synthesis of Neoclassical Metaphysics and Black Theology, Walker offers a synthesis of neoclassical metaphysics and black theology.
In a similar vein, he decries that The Coquette “fills the interims of the action with the same sort of sentiment, didacticism, and stuffy analysis of the 'heart' that clogs Richardson's Clarissa” (1948, 16). In such accounts of ...
The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will offer a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, offering readers practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary ...
A Good Morning America 2021 Top Summer Read Pick The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy ...
As Christmas's blackness is unhinged from legible racial demarcation, and, further, as his sexual exchanges are patently non-reproductive, Joe Christmas is a figure who evades, if not defies, all manner of social and sexual regulation.