Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities

University of Richmond

English Faculty Publications

Series

2016

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Leading Through Reading In Contemporary Young Adult Fantasy By Philip Pullman And Terry Pratchett, Elisabeth Rose Gruner Jan 2016

Leading Through Reading In Contemporary Young Adult Fantasy By Philip Pullman And Terry Pratchett, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

There’s a popular bumper sticker in some areas that reads: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” It is sometimes paired with another one: “Bibles that are falling apart usually belong to people that aren’t.” The two combine to suggest an approach to reading and religion that are at the core of my argument in this chapter: they suggest that religious reading is fundamentally anti-interpretive; that reading the Bible or other religious texts provides direct access to truth. In the young adult texts I discuss in this essay, however, the opposite is the case: while texts (of many …


Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories, Suzanne W. Jones Jan 2016

Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The interracial mixing of American families dates back to colonial times, but the history of slavery and racism in the American South made public discussion of the subject taboo—so shameful for whites that they long repressed facts that challenged their fantasies of racial purity, so painful or politically incorrect for African Americans that they suppressed the details of their mixed ancestry. In the 1970s the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and the television miniseries that followed, sparked an interest in genealogy among many African Americans, who had long given up hope of tracing African roots severed by the middle …