Read complete books and articles on: Native Son by Richard Wright

Wright, Richard - 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in 1927 and in the 1930s joined the city's Federal Writers' Project and wrote Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of four novellas dealing with Southern racial problems. His novel Native

12 of the Best Books and Articles on: Native Son by Richard Wright

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Richard Wright's Native Son (literary criticism) » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 174 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The still controversial first novel by Richard Wright is examined in its entirety as part of this series. "School Library Journal" says ". . . these titles fill a void: literary criticism for high school students".
2.

Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright » Read Now
by Eugene E. Miller. 272 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Wright's works most often have been judged by his own ideological polemics, seldom by the terms of art. This, however, is a study of Wright's poetics, rich in a black aesthetic force that was the elemental voice in his writings.
3.

Student Companion to Richard Wright (Chap. 4 "Native Son (1940, 1991)") » Read Now
by Robert Felgar. 138 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Born in rural Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, Richard Wright overcame every social obstacle, including poverty, racism, and limited education to achieve literary recognition as the creator of some of America's most powerful Black literature. Written with unprecedented candor, Wright's works...
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Born in rural Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, Richard Wright overcame every social obstacle, including poverty, racism, and limited education to achieve literary recognition as the creator of some of America's most powerful Black literature. Written with unprecedented candor, Wright's works changed the cultural landscape by challenging old stereotypes and myths about race. Wright scholar Robert Felgar has written a critical volume to help students appreciate the literary significance of such groundbreaking works as Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy. This study serves students of both literature and social history as it explores the themes of racism and all types of institutionalized oppression that Wright exposed in his provocative writing. Felgar approaches each of Wright's major works in chronological order, offering insightful literary analysis of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider, as well as Wright's two works published posthumously, Eight Men, a collection of stories, and Lawd Today! The original, censored works are discussed and compared with the more recently republished unexpurgated versions.
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4.

Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son, in African American Review » Read Now
by James Smethurst. 11 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment (Chap. Four "Richard Wright's Native Son: Rhetorical Determinism") » Read Now
by David Guest. 179 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Literature that spotlights real-life punitive justice in America.
6.

The Art of Richard Wright (Chap. 7 "Revolution: Native Son") » Read Now
by Edward Margolies. 184 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

The Delinquent's Sabbath; or, the Return of the Repressed: The Matter of Bodies in "Native Son," in Studies in the Novel » Read Now
by Katherine Fishburn. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

The Horror of Bigger Thomas: The Perception of Form without Face in Richard Wright's 'Native Son,' in African American Review » Read Now
by Stephen K. George. 7 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
9.

The Dynamics of the Absurd in the Existentialist Novel (Chap. V "Native Son") » Read Now
by Richard E. Baker. 141 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library
10.

Narrative Ethics ("Native Son" begins on p. 222) » Read Now
by Adam Zachary Newton. 336 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly engaged by literary...
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The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly engaged by literary studies, and to this approach Adam Newton brings a startling new thrust. His book makes a compelling case for understanding narrative as ethics. Assuming an intrinsic and necessary connection between the two, Newton explores the ethical consequences of telling stories and fictionalizing character, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in the process. He treats these relations as defining properties of prose fiction, of particular import in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. Newton's fresh and nuanced readings cover a wide range of authors and periods, from Charles Dickens to Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes, from Herman Melville to Richard Wright, from Joseph Conrad and Henry James to Sherwood Anderson and Stephen Crane. An original work of theory as well as a deft critical performance, Narrative Ethics also stakes a claim for itself as moral inquiry. To that end, Newton braids together the ethical-philosophical projects of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Cavell, and Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of chorus for his textual analyses - an elegant bridge between philosophy's ear and literary criticism's voice. His work will generate enormous interest among scholars and students of English and American literature, as well as specialists in narrative and literary theory, hermeneutics, and contemporary philosophy.
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11.

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Chap. Four "Native Son's Trespasses") » Read Now
by Catherine Jurca. 238 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the...
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This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms "homelessness." In the process, she challenges representations of white suburbia as prostrated by its own privileges.
In novels as disparate as "Tarzan (written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright's "Native Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.
Extending innovative trends in the study
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12.

The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction (Chap. 2 "Richard Wright, Native Son") » Read Now
by Maxine Lavon Montgomery. 118 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

In this exploration of the relationship between biblical apocalypse and black fiction, Maxine Montgomery argues that American writers see apocalyptic events in an intermediate and secular sense, as a tenable response to racial oppression. This work analyzes the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels that rely on the apocalyptic trope.