LEADER 04926nam 2200733Ia 450 001 9910463228903321 005 20200520144314.0 010 $a0-8122-0235-X 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812202359 035 $a(CKB)2670000000418242 035 $a(OCoLC)859160829 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10748511 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000980845 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11611471 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000980845 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10969440 035 $a(PQKB)10499346 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3442122 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse26725 035 $a(DE-B1597)449094 035 $a(OCoLC)1013945181 035 $a(OCoLC)979968266 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812202359 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3442122 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10748511 035 $a(CaONFJC)MIL682344 035 $a(EXLCZ)992670000000418242 100 $a20060710d2007 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 10$aDeans and truants$b[electronic resource] $erace and realism in African American literature /$fGene Andrew Jarrett 210 $aPhiladelphia $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press$dc2007 215 $a1 online resource (232 p.) 300 $aBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph 311 $a1-322-51062-8 311 $a0-8122-3973-3 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [187]-215) and index. 327 $tFront matter --$tContents --$tIntroduction: The Problem of African American Literature --$tChapter 1. "Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed" --$tChapter 2. "We Must Write Like the White Men" --$tChapter 3. "The Conventional Blindness of the Caucasian Eye" --$tChapter 4. "The Impress of Nationality Rather than Race" --$tChapter 5. ''A Negro Peoples' Movement in Writing" --$tChapter 6. "The Race Problem Was Not a Theme for Me" --$tChapter 7. ''A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter" --$tNotes --$tIndex --$tAcknowledgments 330 $aFor a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans-critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka-prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison-perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century-wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960's Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif."Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century. 606 $aAmerican literature$xAfrican American authors$xHistory and criticism 606 $aAfrican Americans$xIntellectual life 606 $aAfrican Americans in literature 606 $aAfrican American aesthetics 606 $aRace in literature 606 $aRealism in literature 608 $aElectronic books. 615 0$aAmerican literature$xAfrican American authors$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aAfrican Americans$xIntellectual life. 615 0$aAfrican Americans in literature. 615 0$aAfrican American aesthetics. 615 0$aRace in literature. 615 0$aRealism in literature. 676 $a810.9/352996073 700 $aJarrett$b Gene Andrew$f1975-$0967991 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910463228903321 996 $aDeans and truants$92493006 997 $aUNINA