附註:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Part one. Introduction -- Some motes in the nineteenth-century eye : on literary taste, the perception of difference, and white images of Blacks -- Differences in perception : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Walden, and Invisible Man -- The probable and ordinary course of man's experience : antiromance tendencies in the Black literary tradition -- The experience of power and powerlessness and its expression in the literature -- The day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact : the gathering of a self -- Who gave you a master and a mistress? God gave them to me : the role of morality in Black literature -- A spy in the enemy's country : masking in Black literature -- Part two. Introduction -- Charles W. Chesnutt -- James Weldon Johnson -- Wallace Thurman -- Nella Larsen -- Jean Toomer -- Conclusion.
摘要:In Part One I examine the literary, historical, and social contexts within which the emerging Black literature took root. Conditions encouraged certain qualities in the literature, qualities which have persisted as racism has persisted: 1) a collective point of view; 2) the mimetic mode; 3) a sensitivity to the play of power; 4) a consciousness of the fragility of the self; 5) a predilection for the moral imperative; and 6) a recurrence of the tactic of masking. The preoccupation with identity and the self, among the writers considered in Part Two, grows out of the pressures explored in Part One. - p. x.
