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

For over centuries, critics and the black group have tended to method African-American literature as easily yet one more entrance within the vital struggle 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 contain the biggest physique of literature produced via slaves in human background. The publication contains 3 sections: chosen experiences of slave narratives, relationship from 1750 to 1861; essays analyzing how such narratives function historic fabric; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.

Slave Narratives after Slavery

The pre-Civil warfare autobiographies of well-known fugitives similar 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 put in writing approximately their adventure of enslavement and their upward fight to achieve the promise of freedom and citizenship.

Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction

The fashionable proposal of Victorians is they have been impassive prudes, imprisoned by means of sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection purely 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 with regards to a century.