Conjuring the folk
Subtitle: forms of modernity in African America
By: David G. Nicholls.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 180
Subjects: American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; Literature and folklore -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; African Americans -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; African Americans in literature.; African Americans -- Folklore.; Folklore in literature.
Description: "In a series of revisionary readings, Nicholls studies how the folk is shaped by the ideology of form. He examines the presence of a spectral folk in Toomer's modernist pastiche, Cane, and explores how Hurston presents folklore as a contemporary language of resistance in her ethnography, Mules and Men. In Claude McKay's naturalistic romance, Banana Bottom, Nicholls discovers the figuration of an alternative modernity in the heroine's recovery of her lost folk identity.

He unearths the individualist ethos of Booker T. Washington in two novels by George Wylie Henderson and reveals how Richard Wright's photo-documentary history, 12 Million Black Voices, places the folk in a Marxian narrative of modernization that is moving toward class-consciousness."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-169) and index.