Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-296) and index
Literary theory and the black tradition -- The literature of the slave. Phillis Wheatley and the nature of the negro -- Binary oppositions in chapter one of Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, and American slave. Written by himself -- Frederick Douglass and the language of the self -- Parallel discursive universes: Fictions of the self in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig -- Black structures of feeling. Dis and dat: Dialect and the descent -- The same difference: Reading Jean Toomer, 1923-1983 -- Songs of a racial self: On Sterling A. Brown -- The "blackness of blackness": A critique of the sign and the signifying monkey
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Argues that Black literature cannot be characterized strictly as social realism, and offers a textual analysis of works by eighteenth- to twentieth-century Black writers
Figures in Black.
Douglass, Frederick,1818-1895
Toomer, Jean,1894-1967-- Criticism and interpretation
Wheatley, Phillis,1753-1784
African Americans in literature
African Americans-- Intellectual life
American literature-- African American authors-- History and criticism