The Ideologies of African American Literature

From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt : a Sociology of Literature Perspective

Author: Robert E. Washington
ISBN: 9780742509504

This book embarks on new intellectual terrain as the first systematic and theoretically grounded sociological study of African American literature. It examines the impact of race relations, as well as other social and political forces, on the development of the dominant ideological outlooks of African American literature. Spanning the fifty year period from 1920 to 1970, encompassing the mass northern movement, urbanization, and modernization of the African American community, and culminating in the civil rights revolution, it is the first sociological study that situates black literary discourse, and the major black American literary intellectuals (e.g. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka), in the social and political developments of American race relations. By analyzing the formation, influence, and decline of each of the five dominant schools of black literary discourse over those five tumultuous decades, it explains how black literary product

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Publish Date: 2001

Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / General, Literary Criticism / American / African American

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Literature/Fiction (LITR))