{"title":"Trudier Harris","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fiction-and-folklore-book-trudier-harris-9780870497919","title":"Fiction and Folklore","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eBest-selling novelist Toni Morrison has published five major works: Beloved (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988), Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. In this provocative study of Morrison's novels, Trudier Harris blends fictive and folkloric approaches to illuminate the depth and complexity of the African-American literary heritage.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Morrison stands in a long line of black writers who have grounded their characters, themes, and structures in African-American folk traditions.  Typically, students of such grounding have proceeded in two steps--first identifying items of folklore and locating them in previous collections, then interpreting how the items function in the literary text.  Thus critics have viewed folklore as merely grafted onto the \"real\" literature.  While Morrison joins her literary predecessors in drawing on folk materials, her \"literary\" folklore restructures and adapts traditional patterns so creatively that scholars now must reconceptualize the relationship between folklore and literature.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Harris identifies Morrison's primary folkloric strategy as reversal--a process that creates an alternative universe where the antithetical is the norm and the incredible is taken for granted.  Thus Morrison succeeds in creating worlds where the line between history and fiction, legend and fact, is permanently blurred.  Furthermore, in replicating the processes of folk culture, Morrison encourages readers to participate in the creative process itself.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The Author:  Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and Chair of the Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49948443476241,"sku":"CIN087049791XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50373389975825,"sku":"CIN087049791XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/087049791X.jpg?v=1751108283"},{"product_id":"bigger-book-trudier-harris-9780300269321","title":"Bigger","description":"A biography of Native Son’s Bigger Thomas that examines his continued relevance in debates over Black men and the violence of racism     Bigger Thomas, the central figure in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), eludes easy categorization. A violent and troubled character who rejects the rules of society, Bigger is both victim and perpetrator, damaged by racism and segregation on the South Side of Chicago, seemingly raping and killing without regrets. His story has electrified readers for more than eight decades, and it continues to galvanize debates around representation, respectability, social justice, and racism in American life.     In this book, distinguished scholar Trudier Harris examines the literary life of Bigger Thomas from his birth to the current day. Harris explores the debates between Black critics and Communist artists in the 1930s and 1940s over the “political novel,” the censorship of Native Son by white publishers, and the work’s initial reception—as well as interpretations from Black feminists and Black Power activists in the decades that followed, up to the novel’s resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement today. Bigger, Harris argues, represents the knotted heart of American racism, damning and unsettling, and still very much with us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50106842186001,"sku":"NGR9780300269321","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50280494465297,"sku":"CIN0300269323VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000719212817,"sku":"NIN9780300269321","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52885650866449,"sku":"CIN0300269323LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300269323.jpg?v=1750695233"},{"product_id":"summer-snow-book-trudier-harris-9780807072554","title":"Summer Snow","description":"Trudier Harris will tell you that African Americans who consider themselves Southern are about as rare as summer snow. 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Black writers have graphically portrayed such tragic incidents in their writings. In doing so, they seem to be acting out a communal role—a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race.   Exorcising Blackness demonstrates that the closeness and intensity of black people's historical experiences sometimes overshadows, frequently infuses and enhances, and definitely makes richer in texture the art of black writers. By reviewing the historical and literary interconnections of the rituals of exorcism, Harris opens up the hidden psyche—the soul—of black American writers.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50588230320401,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50588231336209,"sku":"CIN0253319951G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0253319951.jpg?v=1752316800"},{"product_id":"new-essays-on-go-tell-it-on-the-mountain-book-trudier-harris-9780521498265","title":"New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain","description":"James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel. Trudier Harris's introduction traces the history of its composition and the critical responses after its eventual publication; Michael F. Lynch re-evaluates the religious centre of the novel; Bryan R. Washington argues that the text has much to do with the uncovering of sexual identity; Vivian M. May uncovers the shifting identities throughout the work; and Keith Clark explores the quest of the characters for male communitas.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51003127693585,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51003130773777,"sku":"NIN9780521498265","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52401180377361,"sku":"NLS9780521498265","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0521498260.jpg?v=1750783099"},{"product_id":"scary-mason-dixon-line-book-trudier-harris-9780807152300","title":"The Scary Mason-Dixon Line","description":"New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way.   Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender.   Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing.   A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007747227921,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007749914897,"sku":"NIN9780807152300","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52480454328593,"sku":"NLS9780807152300","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807152307.jpg?v=1762597529"},{"product_id":"power-of-the-porch-book-trudier-harris-9780820318578","title":"The Power of the Porch","description":"Southern literature is often celebrated for its \"told,\" rather than \"written,\" qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the \"power of the porch.\"   In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the \"power of the porch\" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer.     Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands while she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in small southern towns), Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs.     The back and forth, the presentation and response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the South. Through tales of Brer Rabbit, John and Ole Marster, dog ghosts and other revenants, they have established and perpetuated an oral tradition that in turn shapes both the creation and enjoyment of the written word.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008360087825,"sku":"NIN9780820318578","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820318574.jpg?v=1766138850"},{"product_id":"black-women-fiction-james-baldwin-book-trudier-harris-9780870495342","title":"Black Women Fiction James Baldwin","description":"In James Baldwin's fiction, according to Trudier Harris, Black women are conceptually limited figures until their author ceases to measure them by standards of the community fundamentalist church. Harris analyzes works written over a thirty-year period to show how Baldwin's development of female character progresses through time.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Black women in the early fiction, responding to their elders as well as to religious influences, see their lives in terms of duty as wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. Failure in any of these roles leads to feelings of guilt and the expectation of damnation. In his later works, Baldwin adopts a new point of view, acknowledging complex extenuating circumstances in lieu of pronouncing moral judgement. Female characters in works written at this stage eventually come to believe that the church affords no comfort.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Baldwin subsequently makes villains of some female churchgoers, and caring women who do not attend church become his most attractive characters. Still later in Baldwin's career, a woman who frees herself of guilt by moving completely beyond the church attains greater contentment than almost all of her counterparts in the earlier works.  ","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51126639788305,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51126641000721,"sku":"NIN9780870495342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181255090449,"sku":"NLS9780870495342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0870495348.jpg?v=1761991178"},{"product_id":"summer-snow-book-trudier-harris-9780807072547","title":"Summer Snow","description":"Trudier Harris will tell you that African Americans who consider themselves Southern are about as rare as summer snow. 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She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. 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Focusing on the issue of stereotypes, the new edition of Trudier Harris’s classic 1982 study From Mammies to Militants examines the position of the domestic in Black American literature with a new afterword bringing her analysis into the present.   From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors.   Harris combines folkloristic, sociological, historical, and psychological analyses with literary ones, drawing on her own interviews with Black women who worked as domestics. She explores the differences between Northern and Southern maids and between “mammy” and “militant.” Her invaluable book provides a sweeping exploration of Black American writers of the twentieth century, with extended discussion of works by Charles Chesnutt, Kristin Hunter, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, Alice Childress, John A. Williams, Douglas Turner Ward, Barbara Woods, Ted Shine, and Ed Bullins. Often privileging political statements over realistic characterization in the design of their texts, the authors in Harris’s study urged Black Americans to take action to change their powerless conditions, politely if possible, violently if necessary. Through their commitment to improving the conditions of Black people in America, these writers demonstrate the connectedness of art and politics.   In her new afterword, “From Militants to Movie Stars,” Harris looks at domestic workers in African American literature after the original publication of her book in 1982. Exploring five subsequent literary treatments of Black domestic workers from Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying to Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Harris tracks how the landscape of representation of domestic workers has broken with tradition and continues to transform into something entirely new.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51799038624017,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51799039082769,"sku":"NGR9780817322038","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780817322038.jpg?v=1763476489"},{"product_id":"from-mammies-to-militants-book-trudier-harris-9780817361518","title":"From Mammies to Militants","description":"Welfare queen, hot momma, unwed mother: these stereotypes of Black women share their historical conception in the image of the Black woman as domestic. Focusing on the issue of stereotypes, the new edition of Trudier Harris’s classic 1982 study From Mammies to Militants examines the position of the domestic in Black American literature with a new afterword bringing her analysis into the present.   From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors.   Harris combines folkloristic, sociological, historical, and psychological analyses with literary ones, drawing on her own interviews with Black women who worked as domestics. She explores the differences between Northern and Southern maids and between “mammy” and “militant.” Her invaluable book provides a sweeping exploration of Black American writers of the twentieth century, with extended discussion of works by Charles Chesnutt, Kristin Hunter, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, Alice Childress, John A. Williams, Douglas Turner Ward, Barbara Woods, Ted Shine, and Ed Bullins. Often privileging political statements over realistic characterization in the design of their texts, the authors in Harris’s study urged Black Americans to take action to change their powerless conditions, politely if possible, violently if necessary. Through their commitment to improving the conditions of Black people in America, these writers demonstrate the connectedness of art and politics.   In her new afterword, “From Militants to Movie Stars,” Harris looks at domestic workers in African American literature after the original publication of her book in 1982. Exploring five subsequent literary treatments of Black domestic workers from Ernest J. 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Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the \"power of the porch.\"   In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the \"power of the porch\" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer.     Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands while she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in small southern towns), Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs.     The back and forth, the presentation and response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the South. Through tales of Brer Rabbit, John and Ole Marster, dog ghosts and other revenants, they have established and perpetuated an oral tradition that in turn shapes both the creation and enjoyment of the written word.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53490211160337,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53490211225873,"sku":"NIN9780820357119","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820357119.jpg?v=1777732129"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-trudier-harris.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}