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Palgrave Macmillan

Saints, Sinners, Saviors

Strong Black Women in African American Literature

  • Book
  • © 2001

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Authors:
  1. Trudier Harris
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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 1-20

  3. A Raisin in the Sun

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 21-39

  4. Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery I.

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 41-55

  5. Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery II.

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 57-78

  6. Commanding the Universe

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 79-99

  7. Strength as Disease Bordering on Evil

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 101-121

  8. The Stubbornness of Tradition

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 123-151

  9. Balance?

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 153-171

  10. Conclusion

    • Trudier Harris
    Pages 173-179

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 181-218
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Keywords

About this book

Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in several literary works of the twentieth century. Authors of these works draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations. Instead, strength becomes a problematic trait, at times a disease, in many characters in which it appears. It has a detrimental impact on the relatives and neighbors of such women as well as on the women themselves. The pattern of portraying women characters as strong in African American literature has become so pronounced that it has stifled the literature.

Reviews

'...vivid and provactive descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - Charlotte Observer

'...vivid and provocative descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - D.G. Martin, Rocky Mount Telegram

About the author

TRUDIER HARRIS is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Tony Morrison (1991), and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zona Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996). She has co-edited a number of influential works, including several volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).

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