American Literature Commons^™

Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen

Masters Theses

In my thesis I will discuss the fact that Jean Toomer’s Cane is a grotesque work, one which in several ways resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Jean Toomer never specifically alludes to any of the characters in Cane as grotesques, they consistently exhibit three of the strongest, most characteristic elements of the grotesque: physical and/or psychic deformities, alienation from the reader/viewer, and, most importantly, unrelenting conflict from two opposing elements. In fact, the figures in Cane show even more development of grotesque themes than the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, a collection known for its portrayals of modern …

Commentary: Trotter Review, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

This issue of the Trotter Institute Review is devoted to the portrayal of blacks in the media. The mass media can be a positive or negative force in the struggle for racial progress. Unfortunately, the black community faces media that provide many negative influences. Consequently, there is a continuing need to address this issue.

The mass media is a major instrument of socialization in the American society. As such, it helps to determine how an individual sees the world. The prevailing definitions of social reality and social problems, as well as the characterization of groups of individuals, are learned through …

Reel Blacks: Everything Is Not Satisfactual, Patricia A. Turner

Trotter Review

An unaccompanied black adult female at a matinee performance of Song of the South is about as out of place as Big Bird at a cockfight. However, having encouraged the students in my course on black media images to see the film during its fortieth anniversary run, I felt obligated to reexamine it myself. So there I sat, surrounded by exuberant white pre-schoolers and their parents, watching as animation and live action seamlessly interchanged on the screen in Walt Disney’s adaptation for Joel Chandler Harris’ classic collection of Afro-American folktales.

The Quest That Failed: Jack London's Last Tales Of The South Seas, David A. Moreland

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Bosom Buddies And Lonely Hearts, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorius, Ol' Cap'n nostalgically reminisces about the good old days when he enjoyed what he recollects as close loving relationships with Blacks. He recalls to Gitlow "how you and me growed up together. Had the same mammy - my mammy was your mother." And Gitlow responds, "Yessir! Bosom buddies." Despite the satire and irony with which Ossie Davis consciously invests this scene, it suggest to me another irony - one which Davis certainly did not intend - and that is that one of the images of the Black woman which has frequently been shared by …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

"Preface" To Vision And Refuge: Essays On The Literature Of The Great Plains, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

SEVEN OF THE EIGHT ESSAYS in this volume were prepared originally for the first and second annual symposia sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Those by Barbara Meldrum, John Milton, Paul Reigstad, and Bernice Slote were presented at the conference on "The Cultural Heritage of the Plains," held in April 1977; the essays by Chester Fontenot, Tomas Rivera, and Dorothy Burton Skardal were prepared for the symposium on "Ethnicity on the Great Plains," held a year later. The contribution by Paul Olson was written especially for this volume. Selected essays from the 1977 and 1978 …

Following In Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks: Autobiographical Notes By The Author Of Shuckin' And Jivin', Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

As I began to peruse collections and studies of black folklore, I found that although considerable work had been done from which I was l earning a great deal, there were some aspects of black folklore with which I was personally familiar (from my childhood in Charles City, Virginia, my college days in Petersburg, and my adult life in Richmond) that I had observed as influence in numerous literary works, particularly on temporary works, that were not included in the material was finding, or were not presented in anything even vaguely resembling the versions I knew and saw represented in …

Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Within these two extreme views of woman - the mother who brings death and destruction versus the mother who brings life and salvation - where does the Black American mother stand? It seems to me that it would not be inappropriate to look at the literature, not as mere fiction, but rather as an interpretation and compilation of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and a host of other areas. Thus the true literary artist reveals life more accurately and with more insight than any historical facts and statistical details, because he deals with the truth of the human heart, with the …

Wit And Humor In The Slave Narratives, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This passage suggests something of the nature of Black humor and the function it has served, not only in the slave narratives, but in the folk tales and throughout the history of recorded literature from William Wells Brown to Amiri Baraka. The life revealed in all of these sources is shown to often be alternately degrading and courageous, tragic and absurdly comic, hopeless and yet enduring; indeed that life could hardly ever be termed merely amusing. And the Black character, though he may be seen to laugh, can hardly be deemed carefree, unbothered, satisfied, even truly happy. Indeed the paradox …

In The Beginning: A New View Of Black American Etiological Tales, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

A substantial number of Black folktales may be designated as etiological "myths" in that they tend to focus on the world as it evolved and to frequently portray the role of God in explaining why the Negro is, to quote from one tale, "so messed up," why he is black, why he has big, ugly feet and hands, why his hair is kinky, and why he must remain a poor laborer in a rich society. The causes of all of these "inferior" traits of the Negro appear to be certain alleged defects in his character-his tardiness, his ignorance, his disobedience …

You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin, like innumerable other Black artists, has found that in his efforts to express the plight of the Black man in America, he has been forced to deal over and over again with that inescapable dilemma of the Black American - the lack of a sense of a positive self-identity. Time after time in his writings he has shown an awareness of the fact that identity contains, as Erik Erikson so accurately indicates, "a complementarity of past and future both in the individual and in society." Baldwin wrote in "Many Thousands Gone," "We cannot escape our origins, however hard …

Contemporary Militant Black Humor, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Witnessing the continued plight of their black brothers in America, noting the continued strength of racism in this country, and discouraged by the slowness and ineffectiveness of integration, they have become frustrated and completely disillusioned with the promise of American democracy. If Paul Laurence Dunbar might be said to reflect in some of his works the accommodationist views of the leading black spokesman of his times, Booker T. Washington; and if Langston Hughes might generally be viewed as advocating the thoughtful, rational methods of Martin Luther King and the N.A.A.C.P. with their disciplined social protest and their optimistic faith in …

America's First Negro Poet: The Complete Works Of Jupiter Hammon Of Long Island, Jupiter Hammon, Stanley Austin Ransom Jr, Oscar Wegelin, Vernon Loggins

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Introduction by Stanley Austin Ransom, Jr.

Biographical Sketch of Jupiter Hammon by Oscar Wegelin

Critical Analysis of the Works of Jupiter Hammon by Vernon Loggins

THE POETRY OF JUPITER HAMMON

An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ, With Penetential Cries

An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly

A Poem for Children, With Thoughts on Death

A Dialogue Entitled, "The Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant"

THE PROSE OF JUPITER HAMMON

A Winter Piece

An Evening's Improvement

An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York

Bibliography of the Works of Jupiter Hammon

The Rhetorical Effectiveness Of Black Like Me, Hugh Rank

English Faculty Publications

In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white Southern novelist, disguised himself as a Negro and traveled through the South to experience "what it is like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down." The brief narrative account of this experience is recorded in Black Like Me, a book which wom the Saturday Review's Anisfield-Wolf award in 1962 for its contribution toward race relations. In brief, why is Black Like Me rhetorically effective?

A Critical Analysis Of Negro Character In The American Novel Of The South 1935-1940, Alice Veronica Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis, submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Xavier University in 1943, examines how Black characters are portrayed in novels of the American South published between 1935 and 1940. Johnson begins from her observation that fiction by both white and Black authors tends to favor sensational or degraded types and to leave out the ordinary, self-respecting Black person. She asks whether Southern fiction of the period teaches democratic attitudes. After a first chapter on modern trends and techniques in the novel, she analyzes Black characters as drawn by white authors, including Robert Rylee, Elma Godchaux, …

The Negro In Literature, A. W. Arnaud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the development of the Negro in American literature from its origins in the spirituals through the flowering of the "New Negro" Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Arnaud opens by defining literature as the artistic record of a people's inner life and argues that Negro literary expression developed first through song, tracing the movement from oral spirituals through the early poetry of the enslaved and freed population toward increasingly sophisticated literary forms.

The thesis presents Paul Laurence Dunbar as the foremost early exponent of Negro poetry, examining his biography and his work in both classic English verse …

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poets: Paul Laurence Dunbar • Joseph S. Cotter, Sr • James Weldon Johnson • William Edward Burghardt Du Bois • William Stanley Braithwaite • James Edward Mccall • Angelina Weld Grimke • Anne Spencer • Mary Effie Lee Newsome • John Frederick Matheus • Fenton Johnson • Jessie Fauset • Alice Dunbar Nelson • Georgia Douglas Johnson • Claude McKay • Jean Toomer • Joseph S. Cotter, Jr • Blanche Taylor Dickinson • Frank Horne • Lewis Alexander • Sterling A. Brown • Clarissa Scott Delany • Langston Hughes • Gwendolyn B. Bennett • Anna Bontemps • Albert Rice • …

Color, Countee Cullen

Electronic Texts in American Studies

Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Color (1925), his first published book of poetry, confronts head-on what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the 20th century—the problem of the color line.” The work includes 72 poems, such as the following:

Incident (For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, …

Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts On The Illegality Of Slave-Keeping; Wherein Those Arguments That Are Used In Its Vindication Are Plainly Confuted. Together With An Humble Address To Such As Are Concerned In The Practice., Lemuel Haynes, Paul Royster , Ed.

Electronic Texts in American Studies

This is a regularized text of a private sermon or pamphlet manuscript, authored by a 23-year-old African American who had served in the “minuteman” militia and the Continental Army, and who became an ordained minister and was pastor to white Congregational churches for more than 50 years.

Haynes’ tract is an important and revelatory addition to the early anti-slavery literature in the American colonies. Only identified and published in 1983, it is uniquely situated at the crossroads of independence, anti-­slavery, Congregationalism, and African-American identity. Brought to light by Ruth Bogin, the work is testimony to the diversity of thought and …

New-England Or A Briefe Enarration Of The Ayre, Earth, Water, Fish And Fowles Of That Country. With A Description Of The Natures, Orders, Habits, And Religion Of The Natives; In Latine And English Verse, William Morrell, Andrew Gaudio , Editor

Electronic Texts in American Studies

This text, a Latin poem in dactylic hexameter with an accompanying English translation in heroic verse stands as the earliest surviving work of poetry about New England and the second oldest poem whose origins can be traced directly to the British American colonies. Only two copies of the original 1625 edition are known to survive; one is held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the other is housed at the British Museum. The Latin portion comprises 309 lines and praises the geographic features, flora and fauna of New England, and spends a majority of its verses describing …