Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Published:31st Oct '91
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in African-American writing, Valerie Smith argues that black writers—from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists—affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and on the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, Smith demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the African-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.
An excellent analysis of the relationship of form to content, of the question of self-definition through shaping language to tell one’s own story and create one’s own space in a situation of the oppression of black Americans. * World Literature Today *
A major contribution to the field of Afro-American literary criticism. Smith’s discussion of the nineteenth-century slave narrative is excellent. * Legacy *
ISBN: 9780674800885
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 272g
180 pages