African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to MorrisonPalgrave Macmillan, 2007 M10 15 - 197 pages This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can "speak the unspeakable" and empower their subjects as well as themselves. |
Contents
Representations of Classical Mythology | 19 |
Gwendolyn Brooks Racialization of the Persephone | 67 |
The Destruction and Reconstruction of Classical | 99 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women ... T. Walters Limited preview - 2007 |
African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women ... T. Walters No preview available - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
abduction African American Literature African American women Amalia ancient Anniad Annie's archetypal Augustus Black aesthetic Black Arts Movement Black female Black women Black writers Bluest Eye Ceres characters Cholly classical myth classical revision Classicist contemporary cultural Darker Face Demeter and Persephone Demeter myth Demeter's Dove's earth Echo epic Euripides experience girls Greco-Roman Gwendolyn Brooks Hades hell Homeric Hymn infanticide Jason kill literary male Mecca Medea Milkman Mother Love motherhood mothers and daughters mythic story Narcissus narrative Niobe Niobe story Niobe's notes novel Oedipus oppression Orphic Ovid Ovid's Metamorphoses Pauline Hopkins Pecola Pepita Persephone and Demeter Persephone's Phillis Wheatley play Pluto poem poet poetry Proserpine protagonist racial rape Ray's readers relationship reworking Rita Rita Dove Ronnick Sallie Sappho Sappho of Lesbos scholars Sethe's sexual silence slave slavery Song of Solomon sonnet theme Toni Morrison tradition underworld versions victim Western classical woman womanhood women writers Zeus