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Andrea N. Williams - Dividing Lines - 9780472036745 - V9780472036745
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Dividing Lines

€ 39.37
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Description for Dividing Lines Paperback. Provides fresh insights on the intersection of race and class in black fiction from the 1880s to 1900s Series: Class: Culture. Num Pages: 277 pages. BIC Classification: 2AB; DSA; DSB; JFSC; JFSL3. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 18. Weight in Grams: 363.

One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Publisher
The University of Michigan Press United States
Number of pages
277
Condition
New
Series
Class: Culture
Number of Pages
232
Place of Publication
Ann Arbor, United States
ISBN
9780472036745
SKU
V9780472036745
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About Andrea N. Williams
Andreá N. Williams is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Reviews for Dividing Lines
“Encapsulates debates about anxiety’s role in literary production and its status in critical methodology . . . [as it] delineates the great pains Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt took to describe class divisions within black communities. . . . Beyond representing class and its attendance anxieties, a picture of contestation over the very meaning of class emerges in Dividing Lines, as Williams shows each author prescribing a different term around which she or he believes social classes ought to be organized.” —American Literature

Goodreads reviews for Dividing Lines