Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism
by Eric D. Lamore
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-299-30983-1 | Cloth: 978-0-299-30980-0 Library of Congress Classification PS366.A35R43 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 810.949200092961
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Eric D. Lamore is an associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He is the editor of Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives and coeditor of New Essays on Phillis Wheatley.
REVIEWS
“These provocative essays reveal the exciting state of African American autobiographical studies. The critical approaches explored here—from new-media studies and ecocriticism to reading the interplay between visual and verbal autobiographical acts—not only frame and interpret the life narratives proliferating within today’s digital and popular cultures, they enliven classic literary texts for a contemporary age.”—Angela Ards, author of Words of Witness
“Timely and superb, these essays bring our engagement with African American autobiography—life writing—into this century, urging new approaches to the early literature while guiding us in creative, interdisciplinary assessments of contemporary narratives including comics, online lives, and ‘fluid texts.’ This volume makes us better readers—and quite possibly better writers—of life narratives.”—Robert B. Stepto, Yale University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: African American Autobiography in the “Age of Obama”
Eric D. Lamore
“A Dying Man”: The Outlaw Body of Arthur, 1768
Lynn A. Casmier-Paz
“I Hadn’t Joined Church Yet, and I Wasn’t Scared of Anybody”: Violence and Homosociality in Early Black Men’s Christian Narratives
Joycelyn K. Moody
Olaudah Equiano in the United States: Abigail Mott’s 1829 Abridged Edition of the Interesting Narrative
Eric D. Lamore
The Visual Properties of Black Autobiography: The Case of William J. Edwards
Anthony S. Foy
Richard Wright’s Environments
Susan Scott Parrish
“A Space of Concentration”: The Autobiographical Comics of Richard “Grass” Green and Samuel R. Delany
Brian Cremins
Born into This Body: Black Women’s Use of Buddhism in Autobiographical Narratives
Tracy Curtis
From Blog to Books: Angela Nissel, Authorship, and the Digital Public Sphere
Linda Furgerson Selzer
Grafted Belongings: Identification in Autobiographical Narratives of African American Transracial Adoptees
Marina Fedosik
Reading Signs of Crazy: Pam Grier, a Black Feminist in Praxis
Kwakiutl L. Dreher
Contributors
Index
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Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism
by Eric D. Lamore
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-299-30983-1 Cloth: 978-0-299-30980-0
This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Eric D. Lamore is an associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He is the editor of Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives and coeditor of New Essays on Phillis Wheatley.
REVIEWS
“These provocative essays reveal the exciting state of African American autobiographical studies. The critical approaches explored here—from new-media studies and ecocriticism to reading the interplay between visual and verbal autobiographical acts—not only frame and interpret the life narratives proliferating within today’s digital and popular cultures, they enliven classic literary texts for a contemporary age.”—Angela Ards, author of Words of Witness
“Timely and superb, these essays bring our engagement with African American autobiography—life writing—into this century, urging new approaches to the early literature while guiding us in creative, interdisciplinary assessments of contemporary narratives including comics, online lives, and ‘fluid texts.’ This volume makes us better readers—and quite possibly better writers—of life narratives.”—Robert B. Stepto, Yale University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: African American Autobiography in the “Age of Obama”
Eric D. Lamore
“A Dying Man”: The Outlaw Body of Arthur, 1768
Lynn A. Casmier-Paz
“I Hadn’t Joined Church Yet, and I Wasn’t Scared of Anybody”: Violence and Homosociality in Early Black Men’s Christian Narratives
Joycelyn K. Moody
Olaudah Equiano in the United States: Abigail Mott’s 1829 Abridged Edition of the Interesting Narrative
Eric D. Lamore
The Visual Properties of Black Autobiography: The Case of William J. Edwards
Anthony S. Foy
Richard Wright’s Environments
Susan Scott Parrish
“A Space of Concentration”: The Autobiographical Comics of Richard “Grass” Green and Samuel R. Delany
Brian Cremins
Born into This Body: Black Women’s Use of Buddhism in Autobiographical Narratives
Tracy Curtis
From Blog to Books: Angela Nissel, Authorship, and the Digital Public Sphere
Linda Furgerson Selzer
Grafted Belongings: Identification in Autobiographical Narratives of African American Transracial Adoptees
Marina Fedosik
Reading Signs of Crazy: Pam Grier, a Black Feminist in Praxis
Kwakiutl L. Dreher
Contributors
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE