Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works
Title | Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works PDF eBook |
Author | John Wharton Lowe |
Publisher | Modern Language Association |
Total Pages | 189 |
Release | 2019-08-01 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 1603294228 |
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the story of a woman, a community, and the African American experience from the Civil War through Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. This narrative and Gaines's other novels and short stories explore the life of blacks in the South, their religious traditions and folkways, and their struggles under oppression. The southern communities described are diverse: blacks, creoles of color, poor whites, and wealthy landowners. Part 1 of this volume provides biographical information about Ernest Gaines and a discussion of critical and background studies of his narrative. The essays in part 2 will help teachers of African American literature, American literature, and southern literature convey to their students various aspects of Gaines's work and the adaptations of it in relation to southern literature, history, music, folk culture, and vernaculars of English.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Title | The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman PDF eBook |
Author | Ernest J. Gaines |
Publisher | Bantam |
Total Pages | 274 |
Release | 2012-10-24 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 030783025X |
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review “In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom
Title | Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom PDF eBook |
Author | Laurence W. Mazzeno |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Total Pages | 330 |
Release | 2022-04-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3030941663 |
This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.
A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman
Title | A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman PDF eBook |
Author | Gale, Cengage Learning |
Publisher | Gale, Cengage Learning |
Total Pages | 42 |
Release | 2015-03-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1410335453 |
A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Cherie Quarters
Title | Cherie Quarters PDF eBook |
Author | Ruth Laney |
Publisher | LSU Press |
Total Pages | 302 |
Release | 2022-10-19 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0807178926 |
Cherie Quarters combines personal interviews, biography, and social history to tell the story of a plantation quarter and its most famous resident, renowned Louisiana writer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Ernest J. Gaines. In clear and vivid prose, this original and vital book illuminates the birthplace of a preeminent Black author and the lives of the people who inspired his work. Before he became an award-winning writer, Gaines was the son of sharecroppers in Cherie Quarters, a small Black community in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Drawing on decades of interviews and archival research, Ruth Laney explores the lives and histories of the families, both kin and not, who lived in a place where “everybody was everybody’s child.” Built as slave cabins for the nearby River Lake Plantation in the 1840s, the houses of Cherie Quarters were cold in winter, hot in summer, filled with mosquitoes, and overflowing with people. Even so, the residents made these houses into homes. Laney describes aspects of their daily lives—work, food, entertainment, religion, and education—then expands her focus to the white families who built River Lake Plantation, enslaved its people, and later directed the lives of its Black sharecroppers. The twenty-first century saw the demise of Cherie Quarters. Like many landmarks of Black American life and history, the few remaining structures were razed or fell into ruin. Laney recounts the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of a small, dedicated group to preserve the vestiges of the community—two slave cabins, the church/schoolhouse, and a shed. Engaging and rich in detail, Cherie Quarters highlights the voices of those who called this special place home and shares the story of a lost way of life in South Louisiana.
Rediscovering Frank Yerby
Title | Rediscovering Frank Yerby PDF eBook |
Author | Matthew Teutsch |
Publisher | Univ. Press of Mississippi |
Total Pages | 206 |
Release | 2020-05-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1496827864 |
Contributions by Catherine L. Adams, Stephanie Brown, Gene Andrew Jarrett, John Wharton Lowe, Guirdex Massé, Anderson Rouse, Matthew Teutsch, Donna-lyn Washington, and Veronica T. Watson Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays is the first book-length study of Yerby’s life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion. The contributors to this collection work to rectify the misunderstandings of Yerby’s work that have relegated him to the sidelines and, ultimately, begin a reexamination of the importance of “the prince of pulpsters” in American literature. It was Robert Bone, in The Negro Novel in America, who infamously dismissed Frank Yerby (1916–1991) as “the prince of pulpsters.” Like Bone, many literary critics at the time criticized Yerby’s lack of focus on race and the stereotypical treatment of African American characters in his books. This negative labeling continued to stick to Yerby even as he gained critical success, first with The Foxes of Harrow, the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies, and later as he began to publish more political works like Speak Now and The Dahomean. However, the literary community cannot continue to ignore Frank Yerby and his impact on American literature. More than a fiction writer, Yerby should be put in conversation with such contemporaneous writers as Richard Wright, Dorothy West, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and more.
Swamp Souths
Title | Swamp Souths PDF eBook |
Author | Kirstin L. Squint |
Publisher | LSU Press |
Total Pages | 316 |
Release | 2020-03-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0807173509 |
Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both local and global scales. Across seventeen scholarly essays, along with a critical introduction and afterword, Swamp Souths introduces new frameworks for thinking about swamps in the South and beyond, with an emphasis on subjects including Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, intersectional feminism, and the tropical sublime. The volume analyzes canonical writers such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, but it also investigates contemporary literary works by Randall Kenan and Karen Russell, the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and My Louisiana Love, and music ranging from swamp rock and zydeco to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Navigating a complex assemblage of places and ecosystems, the contributors argue with passion and critical rigor for considering anew the literary and cultural work that swamps do. This dynamic collection of scholarship proves that swampy approaches to southern spaces possess increased relevance in an era of climate change and political crisis.