Race And Form

Download or read book Race and Form written by Dejin Xu and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study presents a contextualized narratology of African American autobiography. The author compares eight autobiographies by seven African American writers from different periods (namely, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) and focuses on both the issue of race and such formal elements as temporal arrangement, narrative situation, narrative perspective, present tense, commentary, unreliability as well as audience. In addition to proposing a major framework for the narratology of autobiography in the opening chapter, the succeeding practical analyses draw on other approaches, such as stylistics and rhetoric, which complement narratology in the investigation of «how» a story is presented.