San Antonio College Library

"Examines the early history of African-American poetry and its place in the American literary consciousness"--Page {4] of cover.

Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker is indisputably one of the leading figures of contemporary African American literature. Author of four novels, two collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and four volumes of poetry, Walker writes of African American women's discovery of their inner selves, selves from which they draw the strength necessary for survival....

Provides information on the work of a black American playwright, best known for his play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." Offers plot summaries and critical overviews of six plays written between 1984 and 1996, and contains a chronology, an overview of his life and career, and a list of productions and credits. Also includes an annotated bibliography of Wilson's dramatic publications as well as articles and interviews about him, and an annotated secondary...

Published less than fifty years ago, Ralph Ellison's Invisible man shares with older classic works the odd quality of seeming to have been in place much longer. It is a novel that encompasses much of the American scene and character: though told by a single Afro-American voice and set in the contemporary South and then in modern New York City, its references are to the First World War, to Reconstruction, to the Civil War and slavery, to the founding...

The Oxford Companion to African American Literature provides the first comprehensive one-volume reference work devoted to this rich tradition, surveying the length and breadth of black literary history, focusing in particular on the lives and careers of more than 400 writers. Here, too, are general articles on the traditional literary genres, such as poetry, fiction, and drama; on genres of special import in African American letters, such as autobiography,...

Looking at the work of Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, and Ida B. Wells, Sandra Gunning examines a range of writers who contributed to the national renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and boundaries of a national dialogue on race, gender, and lynching. In doing so, she argues for a clearer analysis of the issues that were mediated by the figure of the black rapist: namely differing...

In this introduction to the Nobel Prizewinning fiction of Toni Morrison, Jan Furman surveys six novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to reconstruct the development of Morrison's creative vision and to assess its influence in contemporary literature. She traces the recurrent characters, themes, and settings that embody Morrison's literary vision and strike such familiar chords for Morrison's readers. Demonstrating that Morrison strongly supports...

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, the author weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against his own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history.

"This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist. After Winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term "his later novels." These have been dismissed almost uniformly, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became...