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Sacraments of memory : Catholicism and slavery in contemporary African American literature /
"This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of America...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Gainesville :
University Press of Florida,
[2018]
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | "This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience and memory of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights, it cannot account for the striking presence of Catholicism at the margins of these texts, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. Sacraments of Memory thus proposes a new framework for understanding the revisionist aims of these works, contextualizing the skepticism they exhibit towards historical realism in terms of a Catholic counter-tradition in American literature that has long been associated with superstition and irrationality. The authors in the books all marshal this anti-Enlightenment orientation of Catholicism to disrupt the conventional historiography of American slavery and, this book argues, ultimately, to imagine and embody radically different means of remembering the past."--Provided by publisher. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (217 pages) |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-216) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780813052304 0813052300 |