Figures in black [[electronic resource] ] : words, signs, and the "racial" self / / Henry Louis Gates, Jr

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910782089003321
• Autore: Gates Henry Louis
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Oxford University Press, c1987
• ISBN: 0-19-972917-4; 1-280-52425-1; 9786610524259
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (348 p.)
• Disciplina: 810.9
• Soggetti: American literature - African American authors - History and criticism; African Americans in literature; Slavery in literature; Race awareness in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Literary theory and the Black tradition -- Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro -- Binary oppositions in chapter one of Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Written by himself -- Frederick Douglass and the language of the self -- Parallel discursive universes : fictions of the self in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig -- Dis and dat : dialect and the descent -- The same difference : reading Jean Toomer, 1923- 1983 -- Song of a racial self : on Sterling A. Brown -- The blackness of Blackness.
• Sommario/riassunto: For over two centuries, critics and the black community have tended to approach African-American literature as simply one more front in the important war against racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, primarily for their political impact. In this volume, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading scholar in African-American studies, attacks the notion of African-American literature as a kind of social realism. Insisting, instead, that critics focus on the most repressed element of African-American criticism--the language of the text--Gates advocates the use of a close, m