By Stephanie Brown
ISBN-10: 1604739738
ISBN-13: 9781604739732
ISBN-10: 1604739746
ISBN-13: 9781604739749
American citizens on the planet struggle II period obtained the novels of African American writers in unparalleled numbers. however the names at the books lining cabinets and filling barracks trunks weren't the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, yet Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding.In this publication, Stephanie Brown recovers the paintings of those cutting edge novelists, overturning traditional knowledge concerning the writers of the interval and the trajectory of African American literary heritage. She additionally questions the assumptions in regards to the relatives among race and style that experience obscured the significance of those once-influential creators.Wright's local Son (1940) is usually thought of to have inaugurated an period of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible guy (1952) has been solid as either a excessive mark of yank modernism and the one worthwhile stopover so that it will the Black Arts move of the Nineteen Sixties. yet readers within the overdue Nineteen Forties bought sufficient copies of Yerby's historic romances to make him the best-selling African American writer of all time. Critics, in the meantime, have been paying attention to the typical experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, whereas the authors themselves puzzled the duty of black authors to write down protest, in its place penning campus novels, conflict novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their prestige as "lesser lighting" is the made from retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels validated the interval instantly following global warfare II as a pivotal second within the historical past of the African American novel.
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Additional info for The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945-1950 (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
Example text
One of Brown’s major concerns is the development of a black readership competent to understand black texts; he believes that white readers lacked the motivation and ability to do so. Brown goes on to state baldly that a “complete picture” of black life is not possible in an environment dominated by white publishers and readers, as white conceptions of black life are restricted; nevertheless, “the Negro must also work within the present publishing framework. If prejudice does exist, denying complete and honest treatment of Negro life and character, and of course it does, the individual Negro writer must act as far as possible as if it did not exist.
In Park’s words, “The Negro has always produced poetry of some sort. It has not always been good poetry, but it has always been a faithful reflection of his inner life. Expression is, perhaps, his métier, his vocation” (285). Although no respectable scholar holds to the obvious racialism of Park’s account, and most, like Gates, have protested the naïve sociological presumption that literature merely reflects external reality, what has remained true of much African Americanist inquiry has been the claim that expressive forms remain more crucial to a consideration of the conditions of black peoples than they do to considerations of other social groups.
Himes recognized Wright’s “naïve mistake” but glossed the typical white reader’s response somewhat less sympathetically. In a 1963 letter to fellow novelist John A. Williams, Himes, by then an expatriate, expressed his view that literature by and about African Americans had done little to ameliorate the problem of racism: “It always strikes me as funny (in a strange way) that white people [reading African American literature] can take problems of race so seriously, guiltily, when they make these problems themselves and keep on making them.
The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945-1950 (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) by Stephanie Brown
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