Reviews: Transporting Chaucer, Shakespeare's Princes of Wales: English Identity and the Welsh Connection, Shakespeare and the English-Speaking Cinema, Forensic Shakespeare, Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood, the Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-Regulated Minds, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, William Blake in the Desolate Market, Romantic Englishness: Local, National, and Global Selves, 1780–1850, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science & Literature, Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson's Circle, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes, the Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885–1910, Black Resonances: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature, Modernism and Christianity, Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain, Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, Directions in the History of the Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-110
Author(s):  
Neil Cartlidge ◽  
Lisa Hopkins ◽  
Samantha Lin ◽  
John W. J. Curtis ◽  
Karen L. Edwards ◽  
...  
2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Fayaz Ahmad Kumar ◽  
Colette Morrow

This paper analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement on the AfricanAmerican literary productions; especially in the fictional works of Toni Morrison. As an African-American author, Toni Morrison presents the idea of 'Africanness' in her novels. Morrison's fiction comments on the fluid bond amongst the African-American community, the Black Power and Black Aesthetics. The works of Morrison focus on various critical points in the history of African-Americans, her fiction recalls not only the memory of Africa but also contemplates the contemporary issues. Morrison situates the power politics within the framework of literature by presenting the history of the African-American cultures.


2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.


Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-154
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN GIVAN

AbstractThis article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.


Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Holden

Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947–d. 2006), one of the first African American science fiction (sf) authors, remains the most prominent African American women science fiction author. She was born to Laurice and Octavia M. Butler in Pasadena, CA. Her father died when she was a toddler and she was raised an only child by her mother and grandmother. Her family called her “Junie” but most of her friends called her Estelle. An avid reader her entire life, Butler wrote her first sf story when she was about twelve years old after she watched sci-fi B-movie “The Devil Girl from Mars” and realized she could write a better story. She earned an associate’s degree from Pasadena City College and took classes at both Cal State and UCLA. At the behest of Harlan Ellison, whom she met at the “Open Door” Workshop, she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1971, after which she sold her first two stories, one of which, “Crossover,” was published in 1971. She published her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976, and went on to publish a total of twelve novels, seven short stories, and ten Essays. Two additional short stories, both written early in her career, were published posthumously in 2014. Butler also gave numerous Interviews and presentations at sf conventions and conferences. Her writings transformed the science fiction field by showing us futures—usually difficult futures—in which African American women play primary roles and futures in which being black was not exceptional. She brought together multiple genres—slave narrative, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, historical narrative, and vampire literature—and transformed sf tropes—including alien invasion, first contact, post-apocalypse, cyborgs, genetic manipulations, and others—in her boundary-breaking sf. Butler often commented that her fiction addressed three sometimes overlapping audiences: those interested in feminism, African American literature, and science fiction. Her fiction was nominated for and won the top science fiction awards, including two Hugos, two Nebulas, two Science Fiction Chronicle awards, and a Locus award. Butler was the first sf author to receive a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995) and also won a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center (2000). Butler’s fiction and life has had a significant influence on the sf genre and field. Teaching at Clarion West, participating in panel discussions, and offering advice and mentorship, Butler inspired many from the recent generation of sf writers of color and has been claimed by the Afrofuturism movement. Her untimely death rocked the sf world, depriving society of a necessary critical and intuitive voice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 244-258
Author(s):  
A. B. Tanaseichuk ◽  
O. Yu. Osmukhina

The article is devoted to the discussion of the problem of periodization and the study of the features of the late stage of the work of the outstanding American prose writer Francis Bret Hart (1836—1902). The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of American literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an important part of which is the writer’s prose heritage. The authors comprehend Western (J. Stewart, G. Scharnhorst, A. Nissen and others) and domestic (A. V. Vaschenko, L. P. Grossman, P. E. Schegolev, A. I. Startsev, V. A. Libman, E. Yu. Rogonova, A. B. Tanaseichuk) studies on biography and various aspects of the prose writer. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in American studies a gap in the reception of F. Bret Hart's work was filled (the absence of clear criteria for periodization); the tradition of a disdainful attitude to the European period of his work, established in American literary criticism, is refuted, in particular, it is proved that in the stories and novels of the 1880s and 1890s Bret Hart boldly goes beyond the usual themes and images: the “Californian theme”, traditional for his early prose, takes on a new dimension — in the aspect of understanding national and gender psychology (“Maruga”); amorous and melodramatic collisions are combined with an appeal to science fiction (“The Secret of the Hacienda”).


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