Afro-American Studies 391B - S-ModernAfro-Am Women Novelsts

Examine novels written by African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. The course will engage a simple, but fundamental issue: is there such a thing as modern African American women's literature? If so, how might we define it? Some of the ways that we come at this issue will be from the point of genre (e.g., the novel of manners, the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, the gothic romance, the historical novel, and so on.), audience reception, and the relation of the novels to popular culture. Historical contexts of the novels and the impact of various artistic, intellectual, and social movements (e.g., the Civil Rights, Black Power/Arts, First and Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation) on the formal and thematic choices of the authors studied will also be considered.