Recent work in critical theory

Style, Winter, 1995 by William Baker, Kenneth Womack

Hakutani, Yoshinobu, and Robert Butler, eds. The City in African-American Literature. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1995.

The essays in Hakutani and Butler's collection explore the function of cityscapes in African-American literature and the place of urban life and narrative in the canon of world literature during the past two centuries. Selections include: Hakutani and Butler's introduction; Robert Butler's "The City as Liberating Space in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass"; Donald B. Gibson's "The Harlem Renaissance City: Its Multi-Illusionary Dimension"; Yoshinobu Hakutani's "The City and Richard Wright's Quest for Freedom"; Jack B. Moore's "'No Street Numbers in Accra': Richard Wright's African Cities"; Eberhard Bruning's "Stadtluft macht frei!: African-American Writers and Berlin (1892-1932)"; Michel Fabre's "Richard Wright's Paris"; John Conder's "Selves of the City, Selves of the South: The City in the Fiction of William Attaway and Willard Motley"; Robert Butler's "The City as Psychological Frontier in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Charles Johnson's Faith and the Good Thing"; Fred L. Standley's "'But the City Was Real': James Baldwin's Literary Milieu"; Yoshinobu Hakutani's "If the Street Could Talk: James Baldwin's Search for Love and Understanding"; Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua's "Metonymy and Synecdoche: The Rhetoric of the City in Toni Morrison's Jazz."; Michael F. Lynch's "The Wall and the Mirror in the Promised Land: The City in the Novels of Gloria Naylor"; Larry R. Andrews' "The Sensory Assault of the City in Ann Petry's The Street"; Priscilla R. Ramsey's "John A. Williams: The Black American Narrative and the City"; Donald M. Hassler's "The Urban Pastoral and Labored Ease of Samuel R. Delany"; and Robert L. Tener's "The Inner and Outer City: A Study of the Landscape of the Imagination in Black Drama."

Harper, Donna Akiba Sullivan. Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995.

Harper examines Langston Hughes' simple stories - his satirical pieces featuring Harlem's Jesse B. Semple - and their place both within his canon as well as American history and literature. Drawing upon Hughes' correspondence, manuscripts, and weekly columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post, Harper explores such works as Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) and Simple's Uncle Sam (1965).

Hawthorn, Jeremy. A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.

In this updated second edition of the 1991 edition of his glossary, Hawthorn adds more than 50 new entries to his lexicon devoted to contemporary literary theory. In addition to his inclusion of an expanded new bibliography, Hawthorn features entries that allow the reader to gain the context for each term as well as its origin and development within the parlance of critical theory.

Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

Hedrick explores Stowe's four-decade literary career, affording particular emphasis to the critical and historical reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its unresolved place in the American literary canon, as well as its depictions of African Americans. Hedrick examines Stowe's works in the context of the multi-layered world of nineteenth-century morals and sensibilities. Hedrick addresses the private tragedies that marked the writer's life, including the deaths of two of her young sons and the chemical addictions of two of her other children.