Introduction : Modernism and the masculinist impulse -- Toomer's male prison and the spectatorial artist -- Of silent strivings : Cane's mute and dreaming dictie -- Hurston's masculinist critique of the South -- Zora Neale Hurston and the romance of the supernature -- Promised lands : the new Jerusalem's inner city and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia story -- Where and when we enter : closing the gap in Morrison's Beloved and Naylor's Mama Day
Summary
"In Masculinist Impulses, Nathan Grant begins his analysis of African American texts by focusing on the fragmentation of values of black masculinity - free labor, self-reliance, and responsibility to family and community - as a result of slavery, postbellum disfranchisment, and the ensuing necessity to migrate from the agrarian South to the industrialized North. Through examinations of novels that deal with black male selfhood, Grant demonstrates the ways in which efforts to alleviate the most destructive aspects of racism ultimately reproduced them in the context of the industrialized city." "Masculinist Impulses discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century black masculinity as both a feature and a casualty of modernism. Scholars and students of African American literature will find Grant's nuanced and creative readings of these key literary texts invaluable."--BOOK JACKET
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-228) and index
