A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison

by Tracy, Steven C.

• ISBN13: 9780195152517
• ISBN10: 0195152514
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Ralph Ellison has been a controversial figure, both lionized and vilified, since he seemed to burst onto the national literary scene in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man. In this volume Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics who look not only at Ellison's seminal novelbut also at the fiction and nonfiction work that both preceded and followed it, focusing on important historical and cultural influences that help contextualize Ellison's thematic concerns and artistic aesthetic. These essays, all previously unpublished, explore how Ellison's variousapprenticeships--in politics as a Black radical; in music as an admirer and practitioner of European, American, and African-American music; and in literature as heir to his realist, naturalist, and modernist forebears--affected his mature literary productions, including his own careful molding ofhis literary reputation. They present us with a man negotiating the difficult sociopolitical, intellectual, and artistic terrain facing African Americans as America was increasingly forced to confront its own failures with regard to the promise of the American dream to its diverse populations. Thesewide-ranging historical essays, along with a brief biography and an illustrated chronology, provide a concise yet authoritative discussion of a twentieth-century American writer whose continued presence on the stage of American and world literature and culture is now assured.

Author Biography

Steven C. Tracy is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	3	(16)
Steven C. Tracy
Ralph Ellison, 1913-1994: A Brief Biography	19	(40)
Maryemma Graham and Jeffery Dwayne Mack
ELLISON IN HIS TIME
"Creative and Cultural Lag": The Radical Education of Ralph Ellison	59	(26)
William J. Maxwell
A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld the Fragments	85	(30)
Steven C. Tracy
"Something Warmly, Infuriatingly Feminine": Gender, Sexuality, and the Work of Ralph Ellison	115	(28)
James Smethurst
The Integrated Literary Tradition	143	(28)
Alan Nadel
Ralph Ellison's Politics of Integration	171	(62)
Lawrence P. Jackson
Illustrated Chronology	207	(26)
Bibliographical Essay: Probing the Lower Frequencies: Fifty Years of Ellison Criticism	233	(28)
Robert J. Butler
Contributors	261	(4)
Index	265