African American Women Writers

Set in a fishing village on Maryland's Eastern Shore in the early 1930s, This Child's Gonna Live tells the story of Mariah Upshur, the wife of a poor oysterman, and her struggles to keep her land and family together amidst the harsh realities of rural African American life.

Twenty years ago, Sarah Elizabeth Wright burst on the literary scene in this nation with a new and compelling novel about Black women and the Black family in America

In 600 poems by 145 authors, this book gives a cross-section of black American poetry writing in the twentieth century.

By poring over tropes of black workers across genres of southern literature in the works of George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright, Taylor reveals the broad reach of black radicalism into experiments with portraying human feelings. These writers grounded interrelationships and stoked emotions to present the social issues of their times in deeply human terms. Taylor emphasizes the multidimensional use of the sensual and the sexual, which many protest writers of the period, such as Richard Wright, avoided. She suggests Henderson and company used feeling to touch readers while also questioning and reimagining the political contexts and apparent victories of their times. Taylor shows how these fictions adopted the aesthetics and politics of feeling as a response to New Deal-era policy reforms, both in their successes and their failures. In effect, these writers, some who are not considered a part of an African American protest tradition, illuminated an alternative form of protest through poignant paradigms.

Focuses on the works of today's women writers and the ways these women writers picture contemporary women. The author discusses writers whose work has been published from the 1960s to the 1970s: Joyce Carol Oates, Erica Jong, Lois Gould, Gail Godwin, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Sarah E. Wright.

Drake examines a group of authors who self-consciously exploited the revolutionary potential of the novel, transforming literary conventions concerning art and politics, readers and characters.