The Black Aesthetic Unbound
Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature
April C. E. Langley
“April Langley persuasively argues that scholars of African American literary history cannot divorce from their work any one of the three elements of the coherent tripartite world made up of Africa, Britain, and British North America.” —Joycelyn Moody, editor of African American Review and Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio
During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley’s The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, “What is African in African American literature?” Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America.
Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism—known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
April C. E. Langley is associate professor of English, University of Missouri-Columbia.
Dec 2007
Literary Criticism/African; Literary Criticism/African American
210 pp. 6x9
$39.95 cloth 978-0-8142-1077-2
$9.95 CD 978-0-8142-9157-3
© THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Links to this page should point to http://www.ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Langley%20Black.html
America’s Gothic Fiction
The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana
Dorothy Z. Baker
“This is a fresh, insightful, and illuminating book that builds appreciation for all the writers Baker considers. It makes valuable contributions to understanding of an immensely engaging topic and opens up possibilities for additional study of providence narratives and the American literary imagination.” —Jane Donahue Eberwein, Distinguished Professor of English at Oakland University
“In terms of style and ease of reading, America’s Gothic Fiction is not only surefooted but also first-rate! It is a polished, easy-to-follow, yet never repetitious or platitudinal, piece of scholarship that readers of all backgrounds will welcome as a wonderful addition to their bookshelves.” —Reiner Smolinski, professor of English at Georgia State University
Secretary to the Salem witch trials, Cotton Mather is the most reviled of our national historians. Yet James Russell Lowell admitted that “with all his faults, that conceited old pedant contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on this side of the water.” In America’s Gothic Fiction, Dorothy Z. Baker investigates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, look to Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana at critical moments in their work and refashion his historical accounts as gothic fiction.
Cotton Mather’s 1702 Magnalia captured the imagination of its readers more than any other colonial history and impressed Americans with its message of American exceptionalism and God’s dramatic intervention on behalf of the country and its citizens. Poe, Stowe, and Hawthorne, who are rarely grouped together in literary studies, have radically divergent responses to Mather’s theology, historiography, and literary forms. However, each takes up Mather’s themes and forms and, in distinct ways, interrogates the providence tales in Magnalia Christi Americana as foundational statements about American history and identity.
Dorothy Z. Baker is associate professor of English at the University of Houston.
July 2007Literary Criticism/American
216 pp. 6x9
$37.95 cloth 978-0-8142-1060-4 (0-8142-1060-0)
$9.95 CD 978-0-8142-9144-3 (0-8142-9144-9)
Traveling Economies
American Women’s Travel Writing
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
“Jennifer Steadman’s Traveling Economies is a fine and invigorating work. Her serious literary recovery of the writers she treats revises our understanding of 19th-century U.S. literature from a variety of perspectives. Particularly noteworthy is Steadman’s analytic integration of African American and white writers, and her corresponding attention to the privileges and/or disadvantages that accrued to each writer due to her race and class.” —Jennifer Greeson, Princeton University
The black and white women travel writers whom Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman investigates in Traveling Economies astonish modern readers with their daring, stamina, and courage. That these women traveled at all is surprising: Nancy Prince spent nearly a decade as an African American member of the Russian Imperial Court; Amy Morris Bradley went to Costa Rica as a governess in hopes of saving her health and finances after years as an impoverished teacher in Maine; and Julia Archibald Holmes carried the banner of dress reform to the heights of Pikes Peak and to the pages of a feminist periodical. Developing the concept of the “ragged edge,” Steadman highlights these women’s shared experiences of penury, work, and independence. Genteel poverty, black skin, outspoken feminism, or sometimes all three impacted the material conditions of their ragged-edge travel (early muckraking journalist Anne Royall walked until her feet were a bloody mass of blisters). Being on the ragged edge also affected the way they represented themselves and their travels (Mary Ann Shadd Cary presented her outspoken advocacy of black emigration to Canada as appropriately feminine). Frances Wright used her travel writing to imagine the new nation as a potential utopia for women citizens; she paid a high price for daring to try to change the social terrain she crossed. Steadman’s interdisciplinary work with archives, newspapers, memoirs, and letters and her thoughtful close readings of the resulting evidence recover these important women’s travels and writing and invite us to rethink where and how women went and what they wrote in antebellum America.
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman is visiting assistant professor in the graduate studies program at Trinity College.
Books are expected October 2007American literature, American Studies; Women's Studies
248 pp. 6x9
$37.95 cloth 978-0-8142-1066-6 (0-8142-1066-X)
$9.95 CD 978-0-8142-9143-6 (0-8142-9143-0)
Executing Race
Early American Women's Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law
Sharon M. Harris
“Executing Race provides a model for interrogating the language and structure of texts that are traditionally considered to be extra-literary. Harris’s conclusions concerning the construction and manipulation of our understandings of race and genre in the eighteenth century, and the implications of such for law and literature are both original and vitally important.” —Dorothy Z. Baker, University of Houston
“Executing Race offers a useful blend of historical material and theoretical perspective, based on solid current scholarly discussions and careful research. The chapters on Lucy Terry, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Belinda alone will be worth the price of the book.” —Pattie Cowell, Colorado State University
Executing Race examines the multiple ways in which race, class, and the law impacted women’s lives in the 18th century and, equally important, the ways in which women sought to change legal and cultural attitudes in this volatile period.
Through an examination of infanticide cases, Harris reveals how conceptualizations of women, especially their bodies and their legal rights, evolved over the course of the 18th century. Early in the century, infanticide cases incorporated the rhetoric of the witch trials. However, at mid-century, a few women, especially African American women, began to challenge definitions of “bastardy” (a legal requirement for infanticide), and by the end of the century, women were rarely executed for this crime as the new nation reconsidered illegitimacy in relation to its own struggle to establish political legitimacy. Against this background of legal domination of women’s lives, Harris exposes the ways in which women writers and activists negotiated legal territory to invoke their voices into the radically changing legal discourse.
Harris’s recovery of little-known writings by well-known writers, along with the recovery of radical women authors of the Revolutionary period, offers new insights into women’s writings, race relations, and the construction of nationalism in the eighteenth century.
Sharon M. Harris is Lorraine Sherley Professor in Literature in the Department of English, Texas Christian University.Jan 2005
288 pp. 6x9
$23.95 paper 0-8142-5131-5
$69.95 cloth 0-8142-0975-0
$9.95 0-8142-9052-3
May 13, 2008