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" The city in African-American literature / "
edited, and with an introduction by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler
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BL
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| Record Number
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637924
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dltt
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| Title & Author
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The city in African-American literature /\ edited, and with an introduction by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler
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| Page. NO
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265 pages ;; 24 cm
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| ISBN
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0838635652
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: 9780838635650
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Includes bibliographical references and index
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| Contents
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Introduction / Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler -- The city as liberating space in Life and times of Frederick Douglass / Robert Butler -- The Harlem Renaissance city : its multi-illusionary dimension / Donald B. Gibson -- The city and Richard Wright's quest for freedom / Yoshinobu Hakutani -- "No street numbers in Accra" : Richard Wright's African cities / Jack B. Moore -- Stadtluft macht frei! : African-American writers and Berlin (1892-1932) / Eberhard Brüning -- Richard Wright's Paris / Michel Fabre -- Selves of the city, selves of the South : the city in the fiction of William Attaway and Willard Motley / John Conder -- The city as psychological frontier in Ralph Ellison's Invisible man and Charles Johnson's Faith and the good thing / Robert Butler -- "But the city was real" : James Baldwin's literary milieu / Fred L. Standley -- If the street could talk : James Baldwin's search for love and understanding / Yoshinobu Hakutani -- Metonymy and synecdoche : the rhetoric of the city in Toni Morrison's Jazz / Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua -- The wall and the mirror in the promised land : the city in the novels of Gloria Naylor / Michael F. Lynch -- The sensory assault of the city in Ann Petry's The street / Larry R. Andrews -- John A. Williams : the black American narrative and the city / Priscilla R. Ramsey -- The urban pastoral and labored ease of Samuel R. Delany / Donald M. Hassler -- The inner and outer city : a study of the landscape of the imagination in black drama / Robert L. Tener
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| Abstract
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While one of the central drives in classic American letters has been a reflexive desire to move away from the complexity and supposed corruption of cities toward such idealized nonurban settings as Cooper's prairies, Thoreau's woods, Melville's seas, Whitman's open road, and Twain's river, nearly the opposite has been true in African-American letters. Indeed the main tradition of African-American literature has been, for the most part, strikingly positive in its vision of the city. Although never hesitant to criticize the negative aspects of city life, classic African-American writers have only rarely suggested that pastoral alternatives exist for African-Americans and have therefore celebrated in a great variety of ways the possibilities of urban living. For Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, the city, despite its many problems, has been a place of deliverance and renewal
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In the words of Alain Locke, the city provided "a new vision of opportunity" for African-Americans that could enable them to move from an enslaving "medieval" world to a modern world containing the possibility of liberation. More recent African-American literature has also been noteworthy for its largely affirmative vision of urban life. Amiri Baraka's 1981 essay "Black Literature and the Afro-American Nation: The Urban Voice" argues that, from the Harlem Renaissance onward, African-American literature has been "urban shaped," producing a uniquely "black urban consciousness." And Toni Morrison, although stressing that the American city in general has often induced a sense of alienation in many African-American writers, nevertheless adds that modern African-American literature is suffused with an "affection" for "the village within" the city. Gwendolyn Brook's poetry and Gloria Naylor's fiction, likewise, celebrate this sense of cultural unity in the black city
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In addition to these writers, the sixteen new essays in this collection discuss the works of Claude McKay, William Attaway, Willard Motley, Ann Petry, John A. Williams, Charles Johnson, Samuel R. Delany, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, and Lorraine Hansberry. The authors of these essays range from critics in America to those abroad, as well as from specialists in African-American literature to those in other fields
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American literature-- African American authors-- History and criticism
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African Americans-- Intellectual life
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City and town life in literature
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African Americans in literature
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Cities and towns in literature
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| Dewey Classification
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810.9/321732
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| LC Classification
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PS169.C57C58 1995
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| Added Entry
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Hakutani, Yoshinobu,1935-
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Butler, Robert,1942-
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