Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self

For over centuries, critics and the black neighborhood have tended to technique African-American literature as easily yet another entrance within the very important warfare opposed to racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, essentially for his or her political impression. during this quantity, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Slave's Narrative

Those autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves include the most important physique of literature produced by way of slaves in human historical past. The ebook includes 3 sections: chosen reports of slave narratives, relationship from 1750 to 1861; essays studying how such narratives function historic fabric; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.

Slave Narratives after Slavery

The pre-Civil struggle autobiographies of well-known fugitives equivalent to Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs shape the bedrock of the African American narrative culture. After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves persisted to jot down approximately their event of enslavement and their upward fight to gain the promise of freedom and citizenship.

Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction

The trendy thought of Victorians is they have been impassive prudes, imprisoned by way of sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection simply in the bounds of matrimony—if in any respect. And but, a wealth of proof contradicting this concept has been hiding in simple sight for on the subject of a century.