Figures in black : words, signs, and the "racial" self / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

African Americans in literature.

Slavery in literature.

Race awareness in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (348 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, c1987.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

For over two centuries, critics and the black community have tended to approach African-American literature as simply one more front in the important war against racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, primarily for their political impact. In this volume, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading scholar in African-American studies, attacks the notion of African-American literature as a kind of social realism. Insisting, instead, that critics focus on the most repressed element of African-American criticism--the language of the text--Gates advocates the use of a close, m

Contents:

Literary theory and the Black tradition

Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro

Binary oppositions in chapter one of Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Written by himself

Frederick Douglass and the language of the self

Parallel discursive universes : fictions of the self in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig

Dis and dat : dialect and the descent

The same difference : reading Jean Toomer, 1923- 1983

Song of a racial self : on Sterling A. Brown

The blackness of Blackness.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

0-19-972917-4

1-280-52425-1

9786610524259

OCLC:

870243384