Literary Ambition and the African American Novel (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781108482073)

This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.

Author: Michael Nowlin
ISBN-10: 1108482074
ISBN-13: 9781108482073
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/07/2019
Pages: 265
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.20w x 0.80d