🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£32.95
Out of Stock

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

The Art of the African American Essay

By (author) Cheryl A. Wall
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, United States
Published: 30th Jan 2019
Dimensions: w 156mm h 234mm d 17mm
Weight: 432g
ISBN-10: 1469646900
ISBN-13: 9781469646909
Barcode No: 9781469646909
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many others writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or only studied in the contexts of their better known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns to her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Be the first to review this item. Submit your review now