Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Sunday, August 30 2009.

• " The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Monday, July 27 2009.

• Added a contributor: Keith Cartwright: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Friday, July 17 2009.

• Following Fa-Digi Sisoko's narration of a royal search party's journey to foreign markets to locate the exiled Sunjata, I will be bringing some of the occulted signs and semiotic systems of Senegambian cultures into the marketplace of American literatures in an effort to discover telling moments of recognition.