美国黑人文学——历史与文化潮流

African American Literature The Harlem Renaissance



Alain Locke (1886-1954) essayist, editor Claude McKay (1889-1948) poet Jean Toomer (1894-1967) poet Anne Spencer (1882-1975) poet
African American Literature The Harlem Renaissance



The artistic and socio-cultural awakening of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s It was centered around the vibrant African American community in Harlem, New York, but had farreaching influence in art, music, literature and social thought. The interplay of art and race, and the aesthetic criteria for evaluating black writing are some of the intellectual legacies of the Harlem Renaissance.
African can Literature
History and Current Trends
African American Literature


The first writings by blacks in America was autobiographical and became known as the Slave Narrative Three themes developed in early African American writings around the issue of slavery: accommodation, protest, and escape
African American Literature The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Poet, playwright, essayist, autobiographer, and children’s book author, Hughes came to attention in 1922 in the anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry. His most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was written in his teens.
African American Literature Post-slavery Era



Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) autobiographer, essayist, educator James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) poet, essayist, editor, educator Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) poet
African American Literature The Harlem Renaissance

Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, Hurston left New York to return to hometown in Florida in 1927. She began collecting folktales, work songs, spirituals and sermons to document the black experience. In 1935 she published Mules and Men, the first volume of black American folklore. Her finest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) portrays the life and journey of a strong female character set in the rural South.
African American Literature
Realism, Modernism, Naturalism


The 1940s -1960s was an era of social change for African Americans. Influences included the Second World War, the Second Great Migration, world-wide social movements such as communism and Marxism, and early civil rights legislation which opened up schools and jobs for many African Americans. Urban realism – urban sensibility defines much of the literature of this era.
African American Literature

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) Orator, journalist, abolitionist, statesman, autobiographer and author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), the most influential African American text of his era. His writing and life created a model of selfhood of such moral and political authority, he was later viewed as a cultural hero.
African American Literature

Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800) Poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the first poem published by a black male in America.
African American Literature

Lucy Terry (1730-1821) Thought to be the author of the oldest piece of African-American literature, “Bars Fight” a poem written in 1746, about an Indian raid on settlers in Massachusetts. It was not published until 1855.
African American Literature Post-slavery Era

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) One of the founders of the NAACP, DuBois published the highly influential The Souls of Black Folk (1903) which created a black intellectual and artistic consciousness. He was an essayist, novelist, academic and the preeminent African American scholarintellectual of his time.
African American Literature

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797) Eqiano was the first black in America to write an autobiography. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) Equiano gives an account of his native land (he was an Ibo from Niger) and the horrors of his captivity and enslavement in the West Indies.
African American Literature

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) Her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is the most comprehensive biography of an African American woman prior to the Civil War. In it she recounts her life in slavery in the context of family relationships reshaping the slave narrative genre to include women’s experiences.
African American Literature

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) The first African-American and the second woman to publish a book in the colonies, she is one of the best known early black poets; her work was praised by leaders of the American Revolution, including George Washington. She is one of the first writers to use an epistolary style (in the form of letters).
African American Literature
Realism, Modernism, Naturalism

Richard Wright (1908-1960) novelist, autobiographer, political commentator. His influential and critically acclaimed novel Native Son (1940) tells the story of a black man struggling for acceptance in Chicago. It garnered him financial success, international fame and his outspoken writing style influenced a generation of black writers.