Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
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A01=Valerie Smith
Author_Valerie Smith
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSL
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780674800885
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 1991
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in African-American writing, Valerie Smith argues that black writers—from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists—affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and on the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, Smith demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the African-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.
