The Ideological Origins of African American Literature / Phillip M. Richards.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Richards, Phillip M., 1950- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romanticism--United States--History.

Romanticism.

Puritan movements in literature.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans.

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

American literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (368 pages).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Knoxville : The University of Tennessee Press, 2025.

Summary:

" Inquiry into African American literature in recent decades has neglected to probe the intellectual structure of the tradition's aesthetics and its underlying ideology. In The Ideological Origins of African American Literature, Phillip M. Richards begins this reconstructive work, illuminating the dialectical backstory of black prose and poetry in America. Richards argues that the social and political forces that influenced white literature were uniquely reacted to, absorbed, and often times rejected by African American literary figures-from the eighteenth-century Puritan notions of a God-centered history to the onset of Romanticism and Modernism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building his case for ideological continuity, Richards surveys a profoundly creative period of 125 years launched by an African American reaction against a racist, mid-eighteenth-century American culture. This epoch in African American literature saw a fusion of Puritan-Protestant culture into a religious and secular worldview, drawing in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, antebellum slave narratives, Richard Allen, and the periodicals of the ambitious African Methodist Episcopalian movement-all of which would form the underlying foundation of a Black Victorian culture. A rising black middle class, Richards argues, would later be secularized by an eroding religious tradition under the pressures of nineteenth-century modernity, the trauma of Jim Crow, and the emerging northern ghetto. Richards further traces the emergence of Romanticism which appeared with white American authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, but would not take shape in African American literature until the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes took stock of Anglo-European culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The Ideological Origins of African American Literature illustrates a pattern of black writing that eschews the hegemonic white culture of the day for an evolving black culture that would define an American literary landscape. "-- Provided by publisher.

"This manuscript traces the emergence of black literature from the traditions of the Puritan Protestant eighteenth century and the more secularized Romantic period to the abolitionist rhetoric and black intelligentsia of the early nineteenth century and finally to the Harlem Renaissance of the twentieth century. Throughout, Richards contends that the process of Protestant and Romantic black cultural formation repeats itself throughout major literary periods in African American culture. The social values formed during the early emergence of black literature reappear and influence African American literary figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Anglo-European setting of Black literature's emergence

Anglo-American continuities of civic and religious thought in the institutional world of early Black writing

The Black assimilation of Jonathan Edward's thought and revival piety

The preaching of Jupiter Hammon

Phillis Wheatley : the consensual Blackness of early African American writing

Wheatley and the sublime

The story of Joseph as slave narrative

Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottabah Cugoano : men of letters

Frederick Douglass, autonomy, and autobiography

Frederick Douglass : culture, literature, and its discontents

Black intellectual writings of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s

Black intellectual formation and and activity within the structure of the A.M.E. Church

W. E. B. Du Bois as Romantic and Modernist

The early poetry of Langston Hughes

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-62190-459-8

1-62190-897-6

OCLC:

1526056307