西北师范大学美国文学通史课件 Chapter 25 Colonial Period.pptVIP

Chapter 25 Multiethnic literature (Ⅰ) African American Literature Introduction 1.History: ●African American literature has come a long way. It is a unique literature because it is all tied up with the unique experience of the African American people and the phases of their steady growth.1 The American Americans have a history of their own. Their life in Africa before they were brought to America, the middle passage when so many of them died on the ships bringing them over, the slavery which was worse than death, the Emancipation after the Civil War, their movement to the cities where their life began to be polarized, the process of integration into the mainstream, and the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights movement--all these factors decide that the literary tradition of the African Americans is to be drastically different from the American literature we have been talking about so far, which is generally Anglo-American, and does not include much of American Indian culture and that of the African Americans. For a long time the images of the African Americans in mainstream American literature had been presented in a distorted manner. Even well wishing writers like Mark Twain were unable to overcome their prejudices. For instance, Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is made out to be very funny and is important in the novel only for helping to reveal the growth of the social awareness of the white boy. These may not be intentional; the writers, dealing with an experience they do not easily share, just cannot help writing about it the way they do. ●African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among