Title African American literature and the classicist tradition : Black women writers from Wheatley to Morrison / Tracey L. Walters

Edition 1st ed Published New York : Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

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Description 1 online resource (197 pages) Contents Introduction: writing the classical Black: the poetic and political function of African American women's classical revision -- Historical overview of ancient and contemporary representation of classical mythology -- Classical discourse as political agency: African American revisionist mythmaking by Phillis Wheatley, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Pauline Hopkins -- Gwendolyn Brooks' racialization of the Persephone and Demeter myth in "the Anniad" and "in The Mecca" -- The destruction and reconstruction of classical and cultural myth in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Beloved and The Bluest Eye -- A universal approach to classical mythology: Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth and Mother Love Summary This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women?s literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can?speak the unspeakable? and empower their subjects as well as themselves Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-194) and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL Print version record digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Subject American literature -- African American authors -- Classical influences American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism Mythology in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. American literature -- Women authors. Mythology in literature. Mythos Rezeption Frauenliteratur Antike USA. Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780230608870 0230608876

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