Black Genius

Black Genius
Author: Dick Russell
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2009-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1602393699

In search of distinctly African-American qualities of genius, Russell has conducted interviews and historical research that explore the roots of black achievement in America. of photos.

A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes

A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes
Author: Steven Carl Tracy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780195144345

Langston Hughes has been an inspiration to generations of readers and writers seeking a passionate and socially responsible art. In this text, Steven Tracy has gathered a range of critics to produce an interdisciplinary approach to the historical and cultural elements reflected in Hughes's work.

Fettered Genius

Fettered Genius
Author: Keith D. Leonard
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813925066

In Fettered Genius, Keith D. Leonard identifies how African American poets' use and revision of traditional poetics constituted an antiracist political agency. Comparing this practice to the use of poetic mastery by the ancient Celtic bards to resist British imperialism, Leonard shows how traditional poetics enable African American poets to insert racial experience, racial protest, and African American culture into public discourse by making them features of validated artistic expression. As with the Celtic bards, these poets' artistry testified to their marginalized people's capacity for imagination and reason within and against the terms of the dominant culture. In an ambitious survey that moves from slavery to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s, Leonard examines numerous poets, placing each in the context of his or her time to demonstrate the antiracist meaning of their accomplishments. The book offers new insight on the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the genteel members of the Harlem Renaissance, how their rage for assimilation functioned to refute racist notions of difference and, paradoxically, to affirm a distinctive racial experience as valid material for poetry. Leonard also demonstrates how the more progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson share some of the same ambivalence about cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. They also have in common the self-conscious pursuit of an affirmation of the African American self through the substitution of African American vernacular language and cultural forms for traditional poetic themes and forms. The evolution of these poetics parallels the emergence of notions of ethnic identity over racial identity and, indeed, in some ways even motivated this shift. Leonard recognizes poetic mastery as the African American bardic poet's most powerful claim of ethnic tradition and of social belonging and clarifies the full hybrid complexity of African American identity that makes possible this political self-assertion. The development that is traced in Fettered Genius illustrates nothing less than the defining artistic coherence and political significance of the African American poetic tradition.

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison
Author: Lawrence Patrick Jackson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780820329932

Author, intellectual, and social critic, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was a pivotal figure in American literature and history and arguably the father of African American modernism. Universally acclaimed for his first novel, Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, Ellison was recognized with a stunning succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award. Despite his literary accomplishments and political activism, however, Ellison has received surprisingly sparse treatment from biographers. Lawrence Jackson’s biography of Ellison, the first when it was published in 2002, focuses on the author’s early life. Powerfully enhanced by rare photographs, this work draws from archives, literary correspondence, and interviews with Ellison’s relatives, friends, and associates. Tracing the writer’s path from poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma to his rise among the literary elite, Jackson explores Ellison’s important relationships with other stars, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and examines his previously undocumented involvement in the Socialist Left of the 1930s and 1940s, the black radical rights movement of the same period, and the League of American Writers. The result is a fascinating portrait of a fraternal cadre of important black writers and critics--and the singularly complex and intriguing man at its center.

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes
Author: James B. Kelley
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438128703

Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Langston Hughes and lists sample topics.

The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century

The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century
Author: Peter Bruck
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 1977-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 902727262X

This volume is a collection of essays on black short stories written between 1998 and 1976. It aims to say something about the black short story as a genre and the development of the racial situation in America as well. The primary aim is to introduce the reader to this long neglected genre of black fiction. In contrast to the black novel, the short story has hardly been given extensive criticism, let alone serious attention. The individual essays of this collection aim at presenting new points of critical orientation in the hope of reviving and fostering further discussions. They provide a variety of approaches, and a great diversity of critical points of view.

Black Womanist Ethics

Black Womanist Ethics
Author: Katie G. Cannon
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2006-02-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1597523739

This study articulates the distinctive moral character of the Afro-American women's community. Beginning with a reconstructive history of the Afro-American woman's situation in America, the work next traces the emergence of the Black woman's literary tradition and explains its importance in expressing the moral wisdom of Black women. The life and work of Zora Neale Hurston is examined in detail for her unique contributions to the moral tradition of the Afro-American woman. A final chapter initiates a promising exchange between the works of Hurston and those of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr. A pioneering and multi-dimensional work, 'Black Womanist Ethics' is at once a study in ethics, gender, and race.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2009
Genre: African American poets
ISBN: 1438115369

Provides a biography of Langston Hughes along with critical views of his poetry and prose.

The Theatre of García Lorca

The Theatre of García Lorca
Author: Paul Julian Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1998-05-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521622929

A study of the plays of García Lorca, the greatest Spanish dramatist of the twentieth century.

The Negro

The Negro
Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1915
Genre: Africa
ISBN: