Read complete books and articles on: Race in Literature

At Questia, we offer:

Exclusive access to more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Trusted resources from leading publishers.
Time saving tools to do better, faster research!

16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Race in Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature » Read Now
by Juda Bennett. 144 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Civilization--20th century. 4. Passing Identity in literature. 5. Afro- Americans--Race identity. 6. Afro-Americans in literature. 7. Mulattoes in literature. 8. Race in...
2.

Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature » Read Now
by Michael North. 260 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William...
Read More

The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.
Show less
3.

Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature » Read Now
by Werner Sollors. 574 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Why can a "white" woman give birth to a "black" baby, while a "black" woman can never give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What makes racial "passing" so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making...
Read More

Why can a "white" woman give birth to a "black" baby, while a "black" woman can never give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What makes racial "passing" so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making "miscegenation" appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person's race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with "the curse of Ham" when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin colour at all? Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of "interracial literature". In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and in-between". Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it. Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Marie Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analysing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of "mixed race." Sollors's interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of "race," and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about "race," and where interracial relations can go from here.
Show less
4.

Race, Citizenship and Law in American Literature » Read Now
by Gregg D. Crane. 299 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity and race and justice within American law and literature in this study. He recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law in accord with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression are evil. Covering...
Read More

Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity and race and justice within American law and literature in this study. He recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law in accord with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression are evil. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, and a range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this original book will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.
Show less
5.

Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage » Read Now
by Josephine Lee. 241 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...literature. 5. Race in literature. I. Title...visual arts, literature, music, dance...has emerged in the past few...issues of race and ethnicity...marginalized literature...
6.

Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative » Read Now
by Samira Kawash. 266 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This book provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, "passing novels", and the writings of...
Read More

This book provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, "passing novels", and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work? The history of the color line in the United States is coeval with that of the nation. The author suggests that throughout this history, the color line has not functioned simply to name biological or cultural difference, but more important, it has served as a principle of division, classification, and order. This book seeks not only to understand, but also to bring critical pressure on the interpretations, practices, and assumptions that correspond to and buttress representations of racial difference.
Show less
7.

The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature » Read Now
by Jane Davis. 161 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Davis argues that African American authors have established a tradition of recurring images of whites in their literature and that they use these images to critique white racism. The book constructs a typology of white images in the black imagination. These images include such stereotypes as the...
Read More

Davis argues that African American authors have established a tradition of recurring images of whites in their literature and that they use these images to critique white racism. The book constructs a typology of white images in the black imagination. These images include such stereotypes as the overt bigot, the hypocrite, the liberal, and the good-hearted weakling. While black authors often explicitly reveal the racism of the overt bigot, Davis shows that black writers are much more subtle in their expositions of other forms of bigotry. The volume provides extensive discussions of such writers as Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin and surveys a number of other African American authors.
Show less
8.

Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture » Read Now
by Jennifer DeVere Brody. 258 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Britons. The British race, "uncertain and uneven...of transformation, in which the "true...forms of English literature and culture, illustrating...elided conjunction of...
9.

Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912 » Read Now
by Sandra Gunning. 198 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature...
Read More

In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in "defense" of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism. In Writing a Red Record Sandra Gunning investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence through the representation of not just the black rapist stereotype, but of other crucial stereotypes in mediating moments of white social crisis: "lascivious" black womanhood; avenging white masculinity; and passive white femininity. Gunning argues that these figures together signify the tangle of race and gender representation emerging from turn-of-the-century American literature. The book brings together Charles W. Chestnutt, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, and Ida B. Wells: famous, infamous, or long-neglected figures who produced novels, essays, stories, and pamphlets in the volatile period of the 1890s through the early 1900s, and who contributed to the continual renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and boundaries of a national dialogue on racial violence.
Show less
10.

Religion, Race, Literature, and Eighteenth-Century America, in American Literary History » Read Now
by Jeffrey H. Richards. 10 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

...Religion, Race, Literature, and Eighteenth-Century...Awash in a Sea of...subject of race. If stance...American literature fails to...full-blown racism in the...
11.

Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance » Read Now
by J. Martin Favor. 192 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

What constitutes "blackness" in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more "authentic" than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement-also known as...
Read More

What constitutes "blackness" in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more "authentic" than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement-also known as the Harlem Renaissance-to explore early challenges to the idea that race is a static category. Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the "folk"-those African Americans "furthest down," in the words of Alain Locke-& how the representation of the folk & the black middle class both spurred the New Negro Movement & became one of its most serious points of contention. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Houston Baker as well as theorists Judith Butler & Stuart Hall, Favor looks closely at the work of four Harlem Renaissance fictions writers: James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, & Jean Toomer. Arguing that each of these writers had, at best, an ambiguous relationship to African American folk culture, Favor demonstrates how they each sought to redress the notion of a fixed black identity. Authentic Blackness illustrates how "race" has functioned as a type of performative discourse, a subjectivity that simultaneously builds & conceals its connections with such factors as class, gender, sexuality, & geography. Offering new insight into the work of the Harlem Renaissance as well as concepts of racialized identity, Authentic Blackness will be welcomed by all those involved in the study of African American literature & culture. It will also be of interest to those concerned more generally with issues surrounding constructions of race.
Show less
12.

The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture » Read Now
by Jon Panish. 168 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

A study of the ways popular culture viewed jazz & its musicians in postwar America.
13.

Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper » Read Now
by John Ernest. 272 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

An examination of how six prominent African-American writers of the nineteenth century reconfigured a threatening world.
14.

Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism » Read Now
by Henry B. Wonham. 196 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick...
Read More

Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, critics such as Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish "the artistic emancipation of the Negro," a project that logically extended to other groups systematically misrepresented in the comic imagery of the period. From the influential "Editor's Study" at Harper's Monthly, William Dean Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery as an alternative to romanticism's "pride of caste," which is "averse to the mass of men" and "consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise." Yet if literary realism pursued the interests of democracy by affirming "the equality of things and the unity of men," why did its major practitioners, including Howells himself, regularly employ comic typification as a feature of their representational practice? Critics have often dismissed such apparent lapses in realist practice as blind spots, vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with realism's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. Henry B. Wonham argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the period's most demanding literary and graphic works. The seemingly anomalous presence of gross ethnic abstractions within works by Howells, Twain, James, Wharton, and Chesnutt hints at realism's vexed and complicated relationship with the caricatured ethnic images that played a central role in late nineteenth-century American thinking about race, identity, and national culture. In illuminating that relationship, Playing the Races offers a fresh understanding of the rich literary discourse conceived at the intersection of the realist and the caricatured image.
Show less
15.

Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker » Read Now
by Elliott Butler-Evans. 227 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Political and social views. 7. Race in literature. 8. Sex in literature. 9. Politics...literature. 10. Semiotics and literature. 1. title. PS374.N4B8 1989...ONE Producing...
16.

Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic » Read Now
by Elisabeth Anne Leonard. 198 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Unlike many classic works of fiction, literature of the fantastic enjoys mass popularity. Because the fantastic is so much a part of popular culture, fantasy literature can represent or address the racial attitudes of its audience. Representations of race in the fantastic provide a measure of the...
Read More

Unlike many classic works of fiction, literature of the fantastic enjoys mass popularity. Because the fantastic is so much a part of popular culture, fantasy literature can represent or address the racial attitudes of its audience. Representations of race in the fantastic provide a measure of the concern the culture has for racial matters. If a work is racist, whether consciously or not, it may perpetuate racist attitudes unless it is carefully examined. At the same time, literature of the fantastic is able to present possible worlds rather than real ones. It is thus a literature of possibility, in which racial matters may be addressed and exposed, so that readers may become more conscious of the evils of racist attitudes. This volume explores the significance of race and color in the works of a wide range of authors, including Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, and Robert Silverberg.
Show less