Product Description: This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore...read more

Product Description: When twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Walker's first collection of poems, For My People, won the Yale Poets Award in 1942, she was just beginning her long and distinguished career as a poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher. When her novel Jubilee was published to great acclaim in 1966, the New York Review of Books said, "[It] chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages...read more

Product Description: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: "Drawing on a deep understanding of the shades and structures of the blues, Steven C. Tracy elucidates the vital relationship between this musical form and the art of Langston Hughes, preeminent poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Tracy provides a cultural context for the poet's work and shows how Hughes mined African-American oral and literary traditions to create his blues-inspired poetry...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Conjuring the Folk addresses the dynamic relation between metropolitan artistic culture and its popular referents during the Harlem Renaissance period. From Jean Toomer's conclusion that "the Negro of the folk-song has all but passed away" to Zora Neale Hurston's discovery of "a rich field for folk-lore" in a Florida lumber camp, Harlem Renaissance writers made competing claims about the vitality of the African-American "folk...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: No significant study of fairy-tale motifs in young adult literature exists as of today. American Young Adult Novels and Their European Fairy-Tale Motifs is the first organized study linking these two genres. This book examines fairy-tale motifs in eleven acclaimed young adult novels published in the 1980s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Best-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. In this provocative study of Morrison's novels, Trudier Harris blends fictive and folkloric approaches to illuminate the depth and complexity of the African-American literary heritage.Morrison stands in a long line of black writers who have grounded their characters, themes, and structures in African-American folk traditions.  Typically, students of such grounding have proceeded in two steps—first identifying items of folklore and locating them in previous collections, then interpreting how the items function in the literary text.  Thus critics have viewed folklore as merely grafted onto the "real" literature.  While Morrison joins her literary predecessors in drawing on folk materials, her "literary" folklore restructures and adapts traditional patterns so creatively that scholars now must reconceptualize the relationship between folklore and literature.Harris identifies Morrison's primary folkloric strategy as reversal—a process that creates an alternative universe where the antithetical is the norm and the incredible is taken for granted.  Thus Morrison succeeds in creating worlds where the line between history and fiction, legend and fact, is permanently blurred.  Furthermore, in replicating the processes of folk culture, Morrison encourages readers to participate in the creative process itself.The Author:  Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and Chair of the Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The powerful novelist here turns penetrating critic, giving us—in lively style—both trenchant literary analysis and fresh insight on the art of writing. “When African American writers began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations,” writes Gayl Jones, they began to transform the European and European American models, and to gain greater artistic sovereignty...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Callander, Marilyn Berg