Sweet home
Subtitle: invisible cities in the Afro-American novel
By: Charles Scruggs.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
Subjects: American fiction -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; African Americans -- Intellectual life.; City and town life in literature.; African Americans in literature.; Cities and towns in literature.; Home in literature.
Description: "In this groundbreaking book Charles Scruggs identifies the black urban experience as a driving force behind the twentieth-century Afro-American novel, resulting in a rich fictional tradition that runs from Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods through Toni Morrison's Beloved. Scruggs begins by discussing the treatment of the Great Migration to the city in Afro-American writing from W. E. B. DuBois and Dunbar through the Harlem writers, establishing both the continuities and breaks between that tradition and that of the writers coming after the Depression. He then considers how four post-Harlem Renaissance novelists―Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison―conceive of the modern city. Scruggs shows how these four writers see the Afro-American's relationship to elite, popular, and mass forms of culture in city life. He also explores the ways in which their writing presents "alternative spaces" that exist alongside of, and often counter to, the visible configurations of the dominant culture."--Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-286) and index.