Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Smith, Valerie

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLiterary CriticismBlack American Studies

ISBN10: 0674800885
ISBN13: 9780674800885
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Oct 1 1991
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.58 Width: 5.51 Depth: 8.22
Language: English
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.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All