Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings A Casebook

by Braxton, Joanne M.

• ISBN13: 9780195116069
• ISBN10: 0195116062
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-31
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these worksthat have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide,for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This casebook to Morrison's classic novel presents seven essays that represent the best in contemporary criticism of the book. In addition, the book includes a poem and an abolitionist's tract published after a slave named Margaret Garner killed her child to save her from slavery--the very incidentMorrison fictionalizes in Beloved.

Table of Contents

Symbolic Geography and Psychic Landscapes: A Conversation with Maya Angelou	3	(18)
JOANNE M. BRAXTON
Initiation and Self-Discovery	21	(28)
DOLLY A. MCPHERSON
Learning to Live: When the Bird Breaks from the Cage	49	(10)
OPAL MOORE
Reembodying the Self: Representations of Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	59	(18)
MARY VERMILLION
Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form	77	(22)
PIERRE A. WALKER
Paths to Escape	99	(12)
SUSAN GILBERT
Death as Metaphor of Self	111	(18)
LILIANE K. ARENSBERG
Singing the Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity	129	(20)
MARY JANE LUPTON
Maya Angelou: An Interview	149	(10)
CLAUDIA TATE
Selected Bibliography	159