Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White

Author:   George B. Handley
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
ISBN:  

9780813919775


Pages:   254
Publication Date:   30 October 2000
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White


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Overview

Since its demise in the nineteenth century, slavery has given rise to an outpouring of literatures that reflect the diversity of its hemispheric legacy, but the discipline of literary studies has been reluctant to admit commonalities among former slave societies in the New World. Examining major novels from the 1880s to the 1970s, George B. Handley shows how fiction from different nations shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority, and racial difference. In comparing these novels, Handley demonstrates the ways in which, ironically, U.S. culture tried to shed its own miscegenated Caribbean image of itself during the time of its greatest expansion into the Caribbean. He argues that imperialism was a means by which the United States could pretend to its own whiteness and civilization by creating a new extranational miscegenation. At the same time, the United States' encroachment in the Caribbean created an environment in which the islands' cultures called upon divergent discourses on the legacies of slavery to retain a sense of autonomy. By offering a critique of current postslavery literary criticism in the Americas as well as exemplary comparative readings of novels by important postslavery writers--including William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Alejo Carpentier, Jean Rhys, Charles Chesnutt, Cirilo Villaverde, Rosario Ferré, and others--Handley seeks to address the major questions raised by this abundance of postslavery literature and finds meaningful correspondences that begin to show the outlines of a larger tradition of postslavery literature in the Americas.

Full Product Details

Author:   George B. Handley
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
Imprint:   University of Virginia Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.372kg
ISBN:  

9780813919775


ISBN 10:   0813919770
Pages:   254
Publication Date:   30 October 2000
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

<p>George B. Handley's book is a timely and a necessary addition toour tools for teaching American literatures in the new millennium. Each chapter ofthis fine study pairs books across language traditions and through relatedpreoccupations, obsessions. One can hardly imagine reading them apart from oneanother now.--Doris Sommer, Harvard University


Author Information

George B. Handley is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University.

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