Product Description: African American writers have incorporated Martin Luther King Jr. into their work since he rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature is a study by award-winning author Trudier Harris of King’s character and persona as captured and reflected in works of African American literature continue to evolve...read more

Product Description: Race and Displacement captures a timely set of discussions about the roles of race in displacement, forced migrations, nation and nationhood, and the way continuous movements of people challenge fixed racial definitions. The multifaceted approach of the essays in Race and Displacement allows for nuanced discussions of race and displacement in expansive ways, exploring those issues in transnational and global terms...read more

Product Description: New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South...read more

Product Description: Contemporary African American dramatists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Pearl Cleage find their creative inspiration in historical events from slavery to the civil rights movement...read more

Product Description: Trudier Harris will tell you that African Americans who consider themselves Southern are about as rare as summer snow. But Harris has always embraced the South, and in Summer Snow she explores her experience as a black Southerner and how it has shaped her into the writer and intellectual she has become...read more

Product Description: Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in several literary works of the twentieth century. Authors of these works draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations...read more

A comprehensive collection of African American writers includes contributions from Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and many others. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the porch...read more

A unique one-volume reference work devoted to black American writers offers four hundred biographical profiles of some four hundred figures major and neglected; entries on important works, genres, literary characters, and aspects of black life; and more. UP. (view table of contents)

Product Description: James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Best-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. In this provocative study of Morrison's novels, Trudier Harris blends fictive and folkloric approaches to illuminate the depth and complexity of the African-American literary heritage.Morrison stands in a long line of black writers who have grounded their characters, themes, and structures in African-American folk traditions.  Typically, students of such grounding have proceeded in two steps—first identifying items of folklore and locating them in previous collections, then interpreting how the items function in the literary text.  Thus critics have viewed folklore as merely grafted onto the "real" literature.  While Morrison joins her literary predecessors in drawing on folk materials, her "literary" folklore restructures and adapts traditional patterns so creatively that scholars now must reconceptualize the relationship between folklore and literature.Harris identifies Morrison's primary folkloric strategy as reversal—a process that creates an alternative universe where the antithetical is the norm and the incredible is taken for granted.  Thus Morrison succeeds in creating worlds where the line between history and fiction, legend and fact, is permanently blurred.  Furthermore, in replicating the processes of folk culture, Morrison encourages readers to participate in the creative process itself.The Author:  Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and Chair of the Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Four of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's moving anti-lynching essays are presented in this volume. Written during the height of the lynching craze at the turn of the century, they elegantly speak to the pain and loss caused by racist thought and action.

Product Description: Among the African-American writers featured in this volume are Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Naomi Long Madgett, Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Richard Wright.

Product Description: Among the African-American authors featured in this volume are James Madison Bell, Charles Chestnutt, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson and Harriet E. Adams Wilson.

Presents Spanish basics for immediate use, a guide to pronounciation, cultural advice, and vocabulary appropriate to such activities as shopping, dancing, and a day at the beach

Product Description: Since the mid-1950s, drama has emerged as a major genre for African-Americans writers. The flood of creative outpourings in the 1960s that led to the black arts movement brought in its wake a new generation of dramatists who provided some of the most influential voices in American literature...read more

Product Description: By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were perfomring a rite of exorcism designed to eradicate the "black beast" from their midst, or, at the very least, to render him powerless and emasculated...read more

Product Description: The mid-1950s brought changes not only to the political and social worlds of African-Americans in the United States, but to their literary world as well-changes reflected in and effected by writers profiled in this DLB volume. Much of the impetus for the surge in black creativity after 1955 came from the 1954 Supreme Court decision abolishing 'separate but equal' education...read more