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About this book
This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Introduction: The Gothic—Old and New, White and Black
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Early Expressions of Black Gothic
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Front Matter
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Black Gothic at Millennium’s End
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Front Matter
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Conclusion: African American Gothic—Uncovering a (Not So) New Tradition
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Back Matter
Reviews
'While there have been partial studies of African American Gothic fictions, this excellent book is now the most lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account on this important subject. Nowhere else can readers so clearly grasp in so many examples so well analyzed how African American authors have radically transformed specifically Gothic conventions to make them profoundly symbolic of the horrors and complexities of the black American experience.' - Jerrold E. Hogle, Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona
About the author
Maisha L. Wester is an assistant professor of English and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: African American Gothic
Book Subtitle: Screams from Shadowed Places
Authors: Maisha L. Wester
Series Title: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315281
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2012
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-00350-8Published: 09 November 2012
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-43426-8Published: 09 November 2012
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-31528-1Published: 09 November 2012
Series ISSN: 2634-579X
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 285
Topics: North American Literature, Postcolonial/World Literature, Cultural Studies, Literary History, African American Culture, Eighteenth-Century Literature