Reading Africa into American literature : epics, fables, and gothic tales
The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian
Criticism, interpretation, etc
1 online resource (270 pages)
606618002
pt. I. Epic impulses/narratives of ancestry
Imperial mother wit, gumbo erotics: from Sunjata to The souls of Black folk
Of root figures and buggy jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison
Myth-making, mother-child-ness, and epic renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead
pt. II. Bound cultures/the creolization of Dixie
"Two heads fighting": African roots, geechee/gombo tales
Creole self-fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "other fellow"
Searching for spiritual soil: milk bonds and the "maumer tongue"
pt. III. Shadows of Africans/gothic representations
The spears of the party of the merciful: Senegambian Muslims, scriptural mercy, and plantation slavery
Babo and bras coupé: malign machinations, gothic plots
"Never once but like ripples": on boomeranging trumps, rememory, and the novel as medium
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010