Browse

Some of the most famous African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “First fight. Then fiddle.” Few readers realize that these poems come from a rich tradition of more than a thousand sonnets written by African American poets over a century and a half. The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research, the study demonstrates that closer attention to the sonnet modifies our understanding of key developments in African American literary history. Each chapter addresses such a development: the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the post-war period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and the disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. Throughout this rich history, the study argues, sonnets have been “troubling spaces” in more ways than one. The sonnet became a contested space when black poets appropriated the “scanty plot of ground” (Wordsworth) from which they had long been excluded. The sonnets written by these poets troubled the material and discursive boundaries African Americans have been facing in a society organized around racial inequality. The confrontation and subversion of boundaries is inscribed into the very structure of the sonnet, which made it a preferred testing ground for such strategies in the literary realm.

This book provides a full-length study of John Edgar Wideman’s entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Wideman engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. The book argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman’s work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman’s personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, Wideman remains understudied. Of particular value is the book’s analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman’s challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, the book finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

Neil Gaiman (1960-present) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically-decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy-award winning DC/ Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally-renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc. award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comic reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language making him a celebrity on a world-wide scale. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to multiple national comics traditions (from such works as Miracleman to the aforementioned The Sandman), to the maturation of American comics as a serious storytelling medium, and to changing the rights of creators to retain ownership of their works, his work continues to be underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. As American Gods tops ratings charts for Starz, Anansi Boys can be found in radio play from the BBC, and adaptations of some of his work from Trigger Warning and Fragile Things become standalone comics by renowned artists, it seems timely to bring the bulk of Gaiman's comics into the scholarly discussion. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, a formal introduction, forward, and afterword examine the work (specifically-comics, graphic novels, picture books, visual adaptations of prose works, etc.) of Gaiman and a multitude of his collaborative illustrators. The essays radiate from an examination of Gaiman's work surrounding proclamations challenging his readers to "make good art'; what makes Gaiman's work unique and worthy of study lies in his eschewing of typical categorizations and typologies, his constant efforts to make good art-whatever form that art may take-howsoever the genres and audiences may slip into one another. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who always seems fully-assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and his own voice far later in his life.

Asian Comics is the first book that covers the comics (comic books and magazines, humor/cartoon magazines, newspaper strips, graphic novels, and gag panels) of the continent − 16 countries in all. Broken into parts on East, Southeast, and South Asia, the book carefully surveys the history and contemporary status of comics, both from artistic and industrial perspectives and including main stream and alternative forms and points out trends, issues, and problems cartoonists face. Decades-long (more than 30 years) research was carried out through interviews with more than 400 comics-related individuals during about 60 trips to Asia for that purpose, observation in their studios/offices and homes, participation with cartoonists in many festivals, symposia, workshops, and lectures, and primary scrutiny of archives, government and other data. Interviewees included the fathers and an occasional mother of Asian comic art and the cream of the crop and some young cartoonists. The result is a structured blend of factual data, views of comics people, and fascinating anecdotes about how cartoonists broke in, their working habits and styles, and their contributions. Also interesting is the first chapter discussing the predecessors of contemporary Asian comic art in the form of paintings, sculptures, scrolls, and puppet drama that displayed caricature, wit and playfulness, satire, and sequential narrative. The book is enhanced by many illustrations and supported by a full bibliography and endnotes.

Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. This book offers an assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this genre. It considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields—including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology—the book shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

This book examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. It asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from the destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism. The cultural conversation articulated through the nation's early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type—the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture. Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, the book firmly bases analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. It explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.

For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.

Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.

The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London single-handedly produced Anglophone Caribbean literature and broadens our understanding of Caribbean and Black British literary history. Writers of this cohort, often reduced to George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Sam Sevlon, are referred to “the Windrush writers,” in tribute to the S.S. Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated the large-scale Caribbean migration to London. They have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anti-colonial, nationalist literary tradition, but, as this collection demonstrates, their uncritical canonization has obscured the diversity of postwar Caribbean writers and produced a narrow definition of West Indian literature. The fourteen original essays in this collection here make clear that already in the 1950s a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean and white-creole—were writing, publishing (and even painting)—and that many were in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, rather than London. Moreover, they addressed subjects omitted from the masculinist canon, such as queer sexuality and the environment. The collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (such as Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); commonly ignored genres (such as the memoir, short stories, and journalism); as well as alternative units of cultural and political unity, such as the Pan-Caribbean as well as potentially trans-hemispheric, trans-island conceptions of political identity.

Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender, III, signifies a timely exploration of the Western obsession with color in its analysis of the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore some of the possible worlds of science fiction (literature, television, and film) to lift blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. In two sections, this collection considers the role that race and ethnicity plays in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from Black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. Analysis of Indigenous science fiction in the second section addresses the effects of colonization, assists in discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, the second section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being and moving between two cultures, effectively alienated as a response to political repression. Black and Brown Planets considers how alternate racial futurisms reconfigure our sense of viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny and, therefore, adds more color to this otherwise monochrome genre.

This book analyzes twenty-first century African American fiction through the proliferation of post categories that arose in the new millennium. These post categories—post-black, post-racialism, post-Soul—articulate a shift away from the racial aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and argue for the individual agency of Black artists over the meaning of racial identity in their work. Analyzing key works by Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, this book argues that twenty-first century African American fiction highlights the push and pull between claims of post-civil rights progress and the recognition of the entrenchment of structural racism. The book contextualizes this shift through the rise of, and presidency of, Barack Obama and the revision of Du Boisian double consciousness. It examines Obama through an analysis of the discourse surrounding his rise, Obama’s own writings, and his appearance as a character. The book concludes that while the claims of progress associated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the post era categories to which it was connected were overly optimistic, they represent a major shift towards an individualistic conception of racial identity that continues to resist claims of responsibility imposed on Black artists.

This book describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The Communist-led John Reed Clubs brought together black and white writers in writing collectives. The Congress of Industrial Organizations’s effort to recruit black workers inspired growing interest in the labor movement. One of the most concerted efforts was made by the National Negro Congress (NNC), a coalition of civil rights and labor organizations, which held cultural panels at its national conferences, fought segregation in the culture industries, promoted cultural education, and involved writers and artists in staging mass rallies during World War II. The formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington. While none of them were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, they all participated in the Left at one point in their careers. Interestingly, they all turned to creating popular culture in order to reach the black masses, who were captivated by the movies, radio, newspapers, and detective novels. There are chapters on the Hughes’ “Simple” stories, Himes’ detective fiction, and Harrington’s “Bootsie” cartoons. Collectively, the experience of these three figures contributes to the story of a “long” movement for African American freedom that flourished during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Yet this book also stresses the impact that McCarthyism had on dismantling the Black Left.

Before the innovative and groundbreaking work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, the Hampton folklorists worked within, but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions, often calling into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. This book brings together these folklorists, along with a disparate group of African American authors and scholars, including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Anna Julia Cooper, to explore how black authors and folklorists were active participants--rather than passive observers--in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battle ground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import, namely, what role have representations of black folklore played in constructing notions of racial identity that remain entrenched up to and through present day, and how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage with black cultural traditions. This study offers a new context for re-thinking the relationship between African American Literature, African American folklore, race, and the politics of representation.

Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault’s French Mother Goose Tales. This book is a major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like “Mr. Fox,” native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children’s toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater. Chronicling the story’s permutations, it presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeard, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples. The book explores rare chapbooks and their illustrations, and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer’s trail over the years, the author looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. The book will provide readers and scholars with an invaluable and thorough grasp on the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.

Much research has been done on the zombie, a critical figure of 21^st century culture, but most of it has been devoted to visual media—especially films and TV. This book is the first monograph to engage the zombie as it appears in contemporary literature. It argues that the zombie is best read both as a formal feature, one that necessitates and enables certain things to happen in fiction, as well as a figure of possibility, one which is best read not symbolically in itself, but for the ideas about possible futures it makes possible. In six chapters, Books of the Dead reads key texts of zombie fiction, from Max Brooks’s World War Z through Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, touching on both so-called literary fiction, genre fiction, comics, and short fiction. It addresses zombie fiction’s capacity to speak about contemporary concerns such as community or better political futures, on race, and on gender, but also argues for the importance of the zombie to contemporary literature as such.

Boys Love (or simply BL) has emerged as a mainstream genre in manga, anime, and games for girls and young women. This genre was first developed in Japan in the early 1970s by a group of female artists. By the late 1970s, many amateur women fans were getting involved and creating and self-publishing homoerotic parodies of established male manga characters and popular media figures. The popularity of these encouraged a surge in the number of commercial titles. Today, a wide range of products, produced both by professionals and amateurs, is rapidly gaining a global audience. This book provides an overview of the BL phenomenon in Japan, its history and various subgenres and introduces translations of some key Japanese scholarship not otherwise available. The book looks at a range of literary, artistic, and other cultural products that celebrate the beauty of adolescent boys and young men. In Japan, depiction of the “beautiful boy” has long been a romantic and sexualized trope for both sexes and commands a high degree of cultural visibility today across a range of genres from pop music to animation. Drawing from diverse disciplinary homes, the chapters unite in their attention to historical context, analytical precision, and close readings of diverse boys love texts.

This book reveals the largely unknown and rather surprising history of the British superhero. It is often thought that Britain did not have its own superheroes, yet this book demonstrates that there were a great many in Britain and that they were often used as a way to comment on the relationship between Britain and America. Sometimes they emulated the style of American comics, but they also frequently became sites of resistance to perceived American political and cultural hegemony, drawing upon satire and parody as a means of critique. The book illustrates that the superhero genre is a blend of several influences, and that in British comics these influences were quite different from those in America, resulting in some contrasting approaches to the figure of the superhero. It identifies the origins of the superhero and supervillain in nineteenth-century popular culture such as the penny dreadfuls and boys' weeklies and in science fiction writing of the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces the emergence of British superheroes in the 1940s, the advent of “fake” American comics, and the reformatting of reprinted material. It then chronicles the British Invasion of the 1980s and the pivotal roles in American superhero comics and film production held by British artists today. This book will challenge views about British superheroes and the comics creators who fashioned them.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother-Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. This book is the chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and Holmes’s life. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife, to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road, the author of which was close to Holmes for more than a decade.

From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. This book takes a long look at American campus life and how it is shaped by students and at the same time shapes the values of all who pass through it. The archetypes of absent-minded profs, fumbling jocks, and curve-setting dweebs are the stuff of legend and humor, along with the all-nighters, tailgating parties, and initiations that mark campus tradition—and student identities. The book traces historical changes in the distinctive traditions embraced by undergraduates. The predominant context has shifted from what it calls the “old-time college,” small in size and strong in its sense of community, to mass society’s “mega-university,” a behemoth that extends beyond any campus to multiple branches and offshoots throughout a state, region, and sometimes the globe. One might assume that the mega-university has dissolved collegiate traditions and displaced the old-time college, but the book finds the opposite. Student needs for social belonging in large universities and a fear of losing personal control have given rise to distinctive forms of lore and a striving for retaining the pastoral “campus feel” of the old-time college. The folkloric material students spout, and sprout, in response to these needs is varied.

Ann Petry (1908–1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry’s ancestors, the James family, served as inspiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by Petry’s daughter, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices. Petry’s maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed “the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get,” and followed that “truth,” working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna’s children, of whom novelist Petry’s mother, Bertha James Lane, was the eldest. History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. This book contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge representations of black people at the turn of the century.