The African American Sonnet

The African American Sonnet PDF Author: Timo Mueller
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496817869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Müller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

The African American Sonnet

The African American Sonnet PDF Author: Timo Mueller
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496817869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book

Book Description
Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. In this book, Müller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin PDF Author: Terrance Hayes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143133187
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Forms of Contention

Forms of Contention PDF Author: Hollis Robbins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820356945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition tells the story of African American sonnet influence: who wrote sonnets and when, who published sonnets, who praised and who opposed the form, who wrote about them critically, how sonnets were included in anthologies, how sonnets have been in and out of fashion, and how sonnet-writers contended with each other. The story of the sonnet's appeal to African American poets from the nineteenth century through the tumultuous twentieth and into the twenty-first, even as sonnet writing remained a vexed pursuit for black poets, for black poetry anthologizers, for Black Arts advocates, and for Black Studies academics, is rich and surprising. Scholarship on black sonnets is only beginning to catch up with the continued output of black sonnets over the past century and a half, particularly in the post-Black Art years. Historically, academic study of African American literature has focused on four concerns: the historical and economic conditions of production and publication of black literature; the political and cultural importance of black literature in America; genres of and trends in black literature; and the nature of the literature as reflective of the black experience. This literary history of African American sonnets engages with these concerns but also opens up a fifth conversation: auxiliary genealogies of influence for black aesthetic production that foreground form and that promote new conversations about form generally: how exactly it enables participation and protest, the overthrow and undermining of aesthetic expectation. Thus, Robbins uses the sonnet as a case study for exploring the broader literary history of African American literature, offering a thorough analysis of the contentious relationship of an old world poetic form to new world poetry"--

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants PDF Author: Jon Woodson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814211465
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly--the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as "romantic" by major, leftist critics and anthologists. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s, by Jon Woodson, uses social philology to unveil social discourse, self fashioning, and debates in poems gathered from anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and individual collections. The first chapter examines three long poems, finding overarching jeremiadic discourse that inaugurated a militant, politically aware agent. Chapter two examines self-fashioning in the numerous sonnets that responded to the new media of radio, newsreels, movies, and photo-magazines. The third chapter shows how new subjectivities were generated by poetry addressed to the threat of race war in which the white race was exterminated. The black intellectuals who dominated the interpretative discourses of the 1930s fostered exteriority, while black culture as a whole plunged into interiority. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants delineates the struggle between these inner and outer worlds, a study made difficult by a contemporary intellectual culture which recoils from a belief in a consistent, integrated self.

American Sonnets

American Sonnets PDF Author: Wanda Coleman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description


Bars Fight

Bars Fight PDF Author: Lucy Terry Prince
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724204
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Book Description
Bars Fight, a ballad telling the tale of an ambush by Native Americans on two families in 1746 in a Massachusetts meadow, is the oldest known work by an African-American author. Passed on orally until it was recorded in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts in 1855, the ballad is a landmark in the history of literature that should be on every book lover’s shelves.

Wind in a Box

Wind in a Box PDF Author: Terrance Hayes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143036869
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes’s resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry.

Heart First Into This Ruin

Heart First Into This Ruin PDF Author: Wanda Coleman
Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
ISBN: 9781574232530
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The first complete collection of Wanda Coleman's original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom. "Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."--Washington Post "Terrifying and fearlessly inventive."--New York Times Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and ruthless intelligence: "to know, i must survive myself," she wrote in "American Sonnet 7." A poet of the people, she created the experimental "American Sonnet" form and published them between 1986 and 2001. The form inspired countless others, from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins. Drawn from life's particulars, Coleman's art is timeless and universal. In "American Sonnet 61" she writes: reaching down into my griot bag of womanish wisdom and wily social commentary, i come up with bricks with which to either reconstruct the past or deconstruct a head.... from the infinite alphabet of afroblues intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions (the details and lovers entirely real) and articulate my voyage beyond that point where self disappears These one hundred sonnets--borne from influences as diverse as Huey P. Newton and Herman Melville, Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan--tell Coleman's own tale, as well as the story of Black and white America. From "American Sonnet 2": towards the cruel attentions of violent opiates as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain towards the locusts of social impotence itself i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin not for any crime but being This is a collection for anyone who values the power of words to name what is real and what is possible in a unique, questioning, and questing mind.

Freedom Time

Freedom Time PDF Author: Anthony Reed
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
"In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed reclaims the power of black experimental poetry and prose by arguing that if literature fundamentally serves the human need for freedom in expression, then readers and critics must see it as something other than a reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. Prior to the successful campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and colonization in the Caribbean, literary politics seemed much more obviously interventionist. As more African Americans and Afro-Caribbean writers gained access to formal political power, more writing emerged whose political concerns went beyond improving racial representation, appealing for social recognition, raising consciousness, or commenting on the political disillusion and fragmentation of the post-segregation and post-colonial moments. Through formal innovation and abstraction, writers increasingly pushed the limits of representation and expression in order to extend the limits of thought and literary possibility. Reed offers a theoretical account of this new "black experimental writing," which is at once a literary historical development, and a concept with which to analyze the ways writing engages race and the possibilities of expression. One of his key interventions is arguing that form drives the politics literature, not vice-versa. Through extended analyses of works by N. H. Pritchard, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time draws out the political implication of their innovative approaches to literary aesthetics"--

The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet

The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet PDF Author: J. Phelan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230512623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
What was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces the history and development of the sonnet throughout the nineteenth-century, examining the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and a number of other key canonical and non-canonical writers.