Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
Browse by Subject: American
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This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more.
Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes's influence on King's rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech.
In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition.
Winner, History Book of the Year, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers
In the riveting and intense Bid Me to Live, H.D. documents her traumatic experiences during WWI on which she blamed a number of personal tragedies, including a stillborn child, the end of her marriage, and her pained relationship with D. H. Lawrence.
Michener’s first novel, Tales of the South Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein used it as the basis for the Broadway musical South Pacific, which also won the Pulitzer. How this all came to be is the subject of Stephen May’s Michener’s South Pacific.
Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Compiling Walrond’s European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient, this collection at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond’s life. It provides insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.