Read complete books and articles on: Ishmael Reed

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15 of the Best Books and Articles on: Ishmael Reed

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Reed Reader ("Mumbo Jumbo" begins on p. 31, "Flight to Canada" begins on p. 69, and "Reckless Eyeballing" begins on p. 111) » Read Now
by Ishmael Reed. 496 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In The Reed Reader Ishmael Reed displays the brilliant and witty satire, politically charged, wildly imaginative storytelling, and caustic cultural criticism that have become his unique trademarks. Included are excerpts from such celebrated novels as The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio...
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In The Reed Reader Ishmael Reed displays the brilliant and witty satire, politically charged, wildly imaginative storytelling, and caustic cultural criticism that have become his unique trademarks. Included are excerpts from such celebrated novels as The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Mumbo Jumbo, and Japanese by Spring (among others) and two of his plays, Hubba City and The Preacher and the Rapper. In addition, a wide selection of his poems and essays are collected here, including "Airing Dirty Laundry" and "Shrovetide in New Orleans". The Reed Reader is the cumulative representation of an astonishingly rich and accomplished career, a powerful testament to Reed's many and enormous literary gifts.
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2.

"Strange, History. Complicated, Too": Ishmael Reed's Use of African-American History in 'Flight to Canada', in The Mississippi Quarterly » Read Now
by Matthew R. Davis. 11 pgs.

Collections: History, Literature, Entire Library

...by Matthew R. Davis Ishmael Reed maintains a complicated relationship...Might to Canada is constructed, Ishmael Reed utilizes the dominant tropes and...a distinctly...
3.

Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, in African American Review » Read Now
by Richard Swope. 18 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...publication of Mumbo Jumbo in 1972, Ishmael Reed proclaimed it "the best mystery...Nao-Hoodoo." The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Ed. Bruce Allen Dick...
4.

Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Chap. 6 "Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference in Baraka's Blues People and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo") » Read Now
by Jeffrey T. Nealon. 208 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Psychology, Entire Library

...Paul de Man, and chapter 6 performs a Deleuzian reading of race and ethical becoming-other in Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed. Chapter 7 focuses many of the books energies...
5.

The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Discussion of Ishmael Reed begins on p. 179) » Read Now
by Stephen F. Soitos. 260 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the HooDoo Trickster, in African American Review » Read Now
by James Lindroth. 12 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Images of subversion: Ishmael Reed and the hoodoo trickster...Lindroth "HooDoo" explains Ishmael Reed in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans...Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938...
7.

Ishmael Reed's Inductive Narratology of Detection, in African American Review » Read Now
by Sami Ludwig. 10 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Burns, Alan and Charles Sugnet. "Ishmael Reed." The Imagination on Trial London...Chapple, Steve. "Writing Fighting: Ishmael Reed." Image 14 June 1987: 17+. Deren...Oxford...
8.

Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (Chap. 4 "The Possession of Resistance: Ismael Reed's Flight to Canada") » Read Now
by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. 288 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave...
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NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.
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9.

Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (Chap. 8 "Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural ProjectIshmael Reed's Japanese by Spring") » Read Now
by Kenneth Womack. 207 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one ofthe most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics...
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As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one ofthe most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.
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10.

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Chap. 6 "On 'The Blackness of Blackness': Ishmael Reed and a Critique of the Sign") » Read Now
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. 290 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the...
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey--which expands the arguments of Figures in Black--makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history.
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11.

African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Discussion of Ishmael Reed begins on p. 149) » Read Now
by Darryl Dickson-Carr. 226 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Satire's real purpose, as a literary genre, is to criticize through humor, irony, caricature, and parody, and, ultimately, to defy the status quo. In African American Satire, Darryl Dickson-Carr provides the first book-length study of African American satire and the vital role it has played, and in...
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Satire's real purpose, as a literary genre, is to criticize through humor, irony, caricature, and parody, and, ultimately, to defy the status quo. In African American Satire, Darryl Dickson-Carr provides the first book-length study of African American satire and the vital role it has played, and in the process investigates African American literature, American literature, and the history of satire.
Dickson-Carr argues that major works by such authors as Rudolph Fisher, Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and George S. Schuyler should be read primarily as satires in order to avoid misinterpretation and to gain a greater understanding of their specific meanings and the eras in which they were written. He also examines the satirical rhetoric and ideological bases of complex works such as John Oliver Killens's The Cotillion and Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger -- books that are currently out of print and that have received only scant critical attention since they were first published.
Beginning with the tradition of folk humor that originated in West Africa and was forcibly transplanted to the Americas through chattel slavery, Dickson-Carr focuses in each chapter on a particular period of the twentieth century in which the African American satirical novel flourished. He analyzes the historical contexts surrounding African American literature and culture within discrete crucial movements, starting with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ending in the present. He also demonstrates how the political, cultural, and literary ethos of each particular moment is manifested and contested in each text.
By examining these texts closely within their historicaland ideological contexts, Dickson-Carr shows how African American satirical novels provide the reader of African American literature with a critique of popular ideologies seldom found in nonsatirical works. Providing a bett
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12.

Contemporary Black American Poets and Dramatists ("Ishmael Reed: B. 1938" begins on p. 143) » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 200 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
13.

Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism ("Ishmael Reed's Multicultural Aesthetic" begins on p. 18) » Read Now
by Jerome Klinkowitz. 203 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...escalated into cultural terms by Ishmael Reed, who opposes Barths Aristotelian...and among contemporary Americans Ishmael Reed is the writer most sensitive to...Amiri...
14.

Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor, in MELUS » Read Now
by John Lowe. 24 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...parallels the paper war between Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker" (248, n.15...particularly African Americans. Ishmael Reed has noted that this mode "includes...Amritjit...
15.

Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (1999) ("Ishmael Reed (1938-)" begins on p. 391) » Read Now
by Emmanuel S. Nelson. 530 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

During the last two decades, African American writers have emerged as a distinct and dominant force in world literature. This reference book offers lively, concise, and current information about the lives and imaginative works of 79 contemporary African American novelists. Each of the alphabetically...
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During the last two decades, African American writers have emerged as a distinct and dominant force in world literature. This reference book offers lively, concise, and current information about the lives and imaginative works of 79 contemporary African American novelists. Each of the alphabetically arranged entries begins with a biographical sketch of the author, offers a judicious critical assessment of the author's major works, provides a representative sample of the critical responses the author's books have elicited, and concludes with a selected bibliography that lists the author's publications as well as useful secondary material. Included are entries for major figures, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, but many noteworthy young writers also receive the attention they deserve. Forty-one of the 79 writers discussed are women, and roughly a dozen of the novelists have identified themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Intended for students and advanced scholars alike, the volume is sophisticated yet accessible to a wide audience.
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