Self-discovery and authority in Afro-American narrative /
Valerie Smith.
Description
- Language(s)
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English
- Published
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Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987.
- Summary
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In this analysis of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing, Smith argues that it is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. She draws various parallels between the narratives and by slaves and contemporary black American fiction and shows how the processes of plot construction and characterization provide the narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. She focuses on autobiogrphies by Olandah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison to demonstrate how narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of Afro-American experience. ISBN 0-674-80088-7: $22.50.
- Note
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Includes index.
- Physical Description
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viii, 167 p. ;
22 cm.
- ISBN
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0674800885 (pbk)
0674800877 (alk. paper)
Viewability