美国黑人小说

1、American black novelsAmerican black novels 美国黑人小说Charles W. Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 November 17, 1932) an African-American author,essayist, political activist and lawyer best known for his novelsandshort storiesexploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil WarSouth The Con

2、jure Woman The stories deal with the racial issues facing the South after the war, often through the comments of the character of Uncle Julius McAdoo. A freed slave, he tells the stories to John and Annie, a white couple from the North, who are visiting in their search for property, as they are thin

3、king of moving south (because of Annies health) and of buying an old plantation in Patesville, North Carolina. Uncle Juliuss stories are derived from African-American folk tales and include many supernatural occurrences built around hoodoo conjuring traditions. They are less idealistic and romantici

4、zed than Johns understanding of Southern culture. They tell of black resistance to and revenge against white culture. The stories basis in folk traditions earned publication of the collection. Chesnutt had originally submitted a proposed collection that included only two or three conjure tales, but

5、the editors felt that these were the best and most innovative part of the collection. They asked him to write more in order to have enough for a full book The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line first published in 1899 a collection of short stories in the realist vein The House Beh

6、ind the Cedars He wanted to express a more realistic portrait of his region and community drawn from personal experience. He was also concerned with the silence around issues of passing and miscegenation, and hoped to provoke political discussion by his novel. What is possible for me is possible for

7、 you - Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. Life as a slave Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryl

8、and, and named by his mother, Harriet Bailey. It was rumored that his father was their master. The plantation was located between Hillsboro and Cordova. His birthplace was likely his grandmothers shack east of Tappers Corner (38.8845N 75.958W) and west of Tuckahoe Creek. Years later, after escaping

9、to the North, he took the surname Douglass, having already dropped use of his two middle names. From slavery to freedom Douglass first tried to escape from Freeland, who had hired him out from his owner Colonel Lloyd, but was unsuccessful. In 1836, he tried to escape from his new owner Covey, but fa

10、iled again. In 1837, Douglass met and fell in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman in Baltimore about five years older than he was. Her freedom strengthened his belief in the possibility of gaining his own freedom A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) The Heroi

11、c Slave. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892) Frederick Douglass，美，美国奴隶生活的记国奴隶生活的记叙文叙文 (1845) “英勇奴隶”。我的奴役和我的自由 (1855) Frederick Douglass的生活和时期 (1881年，校正1892) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses eleven chapters that recount Dou

12、glass life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man.Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most inf

13、luential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. encompasses eleven chapters that recount Douglass life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man is an autobiographicalslave narrativewritten byFrederick Douglassand published in 18

14、55 the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), discussing in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Following his liberation, Douglass, a former slave, went on to become a prominentabo

15、litionist, speaker, author, and publisher. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is Frederick Douglass third autobiography, published in 1881, revised in 1892. Because of the emancipation of American slaves during and following the American Civil War, Douglas gave more details about his life as a sla

16、ve and his escape from slavery in this volume than he could in his two previous autobiographies (which would have put him and his family in danger). It is the only one of Douglass autobiographies to discuss his life during and after the Civil War, including his encounters with American presidents su

17、ch as Lincoln and Garfield, his account of the ill-fated Freedmans Bank, and his service as the United States Marshall of the District of Columbia.Claude McKay In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted st

18、reet life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. McKays novel gained a substantial readership, especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense, and sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attem

19、pt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the uprooted black vagabonds. Home to Harlem was a work in which McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts After graduating from Harvard, where he w

20、as the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement The Souls of Black Folk a classic work of American literature a seminal work in the history of sociolo

21、gy a cornerstone of African-American literary history published in 1903 contains several essays on race, some of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly magazine drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society holds an i

22、mportant place in social science as one of the early works to deal with sociology ni MorrisonAfrican-American literature the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing tod

23、ay with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among the top writers in the United States. Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, s

24、lavery, and equality. Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 brought new attention to African American literature. While the Harlem Renaissance, based in the African American community in Harlem in New York City, existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture. Among

25、 the most famous writers of the renaissance is poet Langston Hughes. Another famous writer of the renaissance is novelist Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Civil Rights Movement era Richard Wright is best known for his novel Native Son (1940), which

26、 tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man struggling for acceptance in Chicago The other great novelist of this period is Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953. Martin Luther King, Jrs Letter from Birmingham Jail. In the 1970s no

27、velist and poet Alice Walker wrote a famous essay that brought Zora Neale Hurston and her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God back to the attention of the literary world. In 1982, Walker won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple. An epistolary nove

28、l (a book written in the form of letters), The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a young woman who is sexually abused by her stepfather and then is forced to marry a man who physically abuses her. The novel was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg. The 1970s also saw African American book

29、s topping the bestseller lists. Among the first books to do so was Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley. The book, a fictionalized account of Haleys family historybeginning with the kidnapping of Haleys ancestor Kunta Kinte in Gambia through his life as a slave in the United Stateswon

30、 the Pulitzer Prize and became a popular television miniseries. Finally, African American literature has gained added attention through the work of talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who repeatedly has leveraged her fame to promote literature through the medium of her Oprahs Book Club. At times, she has

31、brought African American writers a far broader audience than they otherwise might have received.Toni Morrison and the Black Literature As Wright and Ellison established the modern tradition for black literature, more and more talented blacks have emerged to the attention of the literary circles.The

32、Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison has gained tremendous international reputation.Her work aims to empower the black people to act for themselves, to recognize their own world , their own history, and their own reality.She embodies the new development of black literature at the end of 20th century. Bi

33、ography Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of a shipyard welder and a religious woman who sang in the church choir. Her parents had moved to Ohio from the South, hoping to raise their children in an environment more friendly to blacks. Despite the move

34、 to the North, the Wofford household was a world steeped in the oral traditions of Southern blacks. The songs, stories, and womens gossip of Chloe Woffords childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work; a great part of Toni Morrisons struggle has been to create a literary language of black America

35、 that draws strength from the oral art forms of that culture. She was an extremely gifted student, learning to read at an early age and doing well at her studies at an integrated school. She graduated from Howard in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She went on to receive her M.A. in English from Cornell

36、 in 1955. 1964 marks the beginning of her twenty years as an editor at Random House The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. The story of a young girl who loses her mind, the novel was well received by critics but was a commercial failure. Between 1971 and 1972 Morrison worked as a professor of English

37、 for the State University of New York at Purchase while holding her job at Random House and working on Sula, a novel about a defiant woman and relations between black females. Sula was published in 1973. Beloved was published in 1987. Many consider Beloved to be Morrisons masterpiece. Mythic in scop

38、e, Beloved tells the story of an emancipated slave woman named Sethe who is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed. The novel is an ambitious attempt to grapple with slavery and the tenacity of its legacy. Dedicated to the tens of millions of slaves who died in the trans-Atlantic journey, B

39、eloved could be called a foundation story (like Genesis or Exodus) for black America. It became a best seller and received a Pulitzer prize. In 1987 Toni Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the first Afro-American female writer

40、to hold a named chair at a university in the Ivy League. 1993 she became the eighth woman and the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1998 saw the publication of her seventh novel, Paradise. Comment One of the most critically acclaimed living writers, Morrison has been a majo

41、r architect in creating a literary language for Afro-Americans. Her use of shifting perspective, fragmentary narrative, and a narrative voice extremely close to the consciousness of her characters reveals the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulknertwo writers that Morrison, not

42、 coincidentally, studied extensively while a college student. All of her work also shows the influence of Afro-American folklore, songs, and womens gossip. In her attempts to map these oral art forms onto literary modes of representation, Morrison has created a body of work informed by a distinctly

43、black sensibility while drawing a reading audience from across racial boundaries. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreamswhich is to say yes, the work must be political.It seems to me that the

44、best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” (“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”) The Nobel Prize presentation speech points out, “In her depictions of the world of the black people, in life as in legend, Toni M

45、orrison has given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece.” Yet, at the same time, her work is always symbolic of the shared human condition, transcending lines of gender, race, and class. The most enduring impression her novels leave is of “empathy, of compassion with ones fello

46、w human beings.” The Bottom is a mostly black community in Ohio Nel is the product of a family that believes deeply in social conventions; hers is a stable home though some might characterize it as rigid Sulas family is very different: she lives with her grandmother, Eva, and her mother, Hannah, bot

47、h of whom are seen by the town as eccentric and loose. After high school, Nel chooses to marry and settles into the conventional role of wife and mother. Sula follows a wildly divergent path and lives a life of fierce independence and total disregard for social conventions. Shortly after Nels weddin

48、g, Sula leaves the Bottom for a period of 10 years. She has many affairs, some with white men. Upon her return, the town regards Sula as the very personification of evil for her blatant disregard of social conventions. Their hatred in part rests upon Sulas interracial relationships, but is crystalli

49、zed when Sula has an affair with Nels husband, Jude, who subsequently abandons Nel. Ironically, the communitys labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives. Her presence in the community gives them the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. Nel breaks off her friendship with Su

50、la. Sula is a novel about ambiguity. It questions and examines the terms good and evil, often demonstrating that the two often resemble one another. bornBorn : February 9, 1944 (age65)Eatonton, Georgia, USA Occupation :novelist, short story writer, poetGenres(风格风格): African American literatureNotabl

51、e work: The Color PurpleAlice walker She has written on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction(普利策小说奖). Alice walker The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguishe

52、d fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It replaced the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. Early life Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children Her father, who was, in her words, wonderful at math but a terrible farmer, while her mother, wh

53、o helped him in the fields,supplemented the family income by working as a maid. A white plantation owner once asserted（宣称）to her that blacks had “no need for education.” Mrs. Walkers response to him was Dont you ever come around here again talking about how my children dont need to learn how to read

54、 and write.” At the age of 4, Mrs. Walker enrolled Alice into the first grade, a year ahead of schedule. Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (the model in The Color Purple), Walker was writing very privately since she was 8. When she was 14 ，she subsequently

55、became valedictorian(全校第一全校第一) and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior classshe came to realize that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about ho

56、w they turned out, as she has said. In 1952 Walker was accidentally wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because they had no access to a car, the Walkers were unable to take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment, and when they finally brought her to

57、 a doctor a week later, she was permanently blind in that eye. A disfiguring layer of scar tissue formed over it, rendering the previously outgoing child self-conscious and painfully shy. Writing career and success Walkers first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawren

58、ce, and she took a brief sabbatical from writing when she was in Mississippi working in the civil rights movement. Walkers first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland , was published in 1970. In 1982, Walker would publish what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple. The book b

59、ecame a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical play(百老汇音乐剧). The Color Purple is the first African American, woman-authored, epistolary novel. It embodies Walkers womanist views without being reduced to a mere platform for id

60、eological rhetoric. In this novel, Walkers writing reveals the transformative power of female bonding and female love. It offers frank portrayals of bisexual, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships amidst situations that penetrate the core of female spiritual and emotional development.Black feminis