Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography

by Dejin Xu

Overview

This study presents a contextualized narratology of African American autobiography. The author compares eight autobiographies by seven African American writers from different periods (namely, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) and focuses on both the issue of race and such formal elements as temporal arrangement, narrative situation, narrative perspective, present tense, commentary, unreliability as well as audience. In addition to proposing a major framework for the narratology of autobiography in the opening chapter, the succeeding practical analyses draw on other approaches, such as stylistics and rhetoric, which complement narratology in the investigation of how a story is presented.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783039110032
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	01/29/2007
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	8.66(w) x 5.91(h) x (d)

About the Author

The Author: Dejin Xu, Professor of English, obtained his Ph.D. degree from Peking University in 2003 and is now doing post doctoral studies at Beijing Normal University. He has published over 20 essays on English and American literature and auto-/biography studies.

Table of Contents

Contents: Towards a Narratological Framework of Autobiography – One Life into Two Stories: Temporal Arrangement, Narrative Situation and Commentary in Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographies of 1845 and 1855 – The Political and/or the Personal: Perspective, Duration and Style in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road – Present Tense, Unreliability, and Audience in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Report From Part One – Voices from Behind and Beyond the Veil: Stylistic and Rhetorical Devices and the Issue of Black Identity in Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn – Towards a New Poetics of African American Autobiography.