African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition

Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison

T. Walters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781349369621, 9780230600225
• eBook ISBN: 9780230608870
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberatingspace where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Writing the Classics Black: The Poetic and Political Function of African American Women’s Classical Revision
• 1 Historical Overview of Ancient and Contemporary Representations of Classical Mythology
• 2 Classical Discourse as Political Agency: African American Revisionist Mythmaking by Phillis Wheatley, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Pauline Hopkins
• 3 Gwendolyn Brooks’ Racialization of the Persephone and Demeter Myth in “The Anniad” and “In the Mecca”
• 4 The Destruction and Reconstruction of Classical and Cultural Myth in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved and The Bluest Eye
• 5 A Universal Approach to Classical Mythology: Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth and Mother Love
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index