Reading Africa into American literature : epics, fables, and gothic tales / Keith Cartwright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cartwright, Keith, 1960-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African influences.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature--African American authors.

African literature--Appreciation--United States.

African literature.

African literature--Appreciation.

Fables, American.

United States.

American literature--History and criticism.

Gothic revival (Literature)--United States.

Gothic revival (Literature).

Fables, American--History and criticism.

African Americans in literature.

Africa--In literature.

Africa.

Slavery in literature.

Ethics in literature.

Physical Description:

270 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, [2002]

Summary:

The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written.

Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.

Contents:

pt. I. Epic impulses/narratives of ancestry

Imperial mother wit, gumbo erotics: from Sunjata to The souls of Black folk

Of root figures and buggy jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison

Myth-making, mother-child-ness, and epic renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead

pt. II. Bound cultures/the creolization of Dixie

"Two heads fighting": African roots, geechee/gombo tales

Creole self-fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "other fellow"

Searching for spiritual soil: milk bonds and the "maumer tongue"

pt. III. Shadows of Africans/gothic representations

The spears of the party of the merciful: Senegambian Muslims, scriptural mercy, and plantation slavery

Babo and bras coupé: malign machinations, gothic plots

"Never once but like ripples": on boomeranging trumps, rememory, and the novel as medium.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-257) and index.

Includes bibliographic references (pages [241]-257) and index.

ISBN:

0813122201

OCLC:

46918060