"Out from behind this mask" : persona in African American poetry, 1830-1930
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the processes of African American poetry from the nineteenth century through modernism. Through original archival work, research on print cultures, and close formal analysis, it uncovers the contexts of production and reception in George Moses Horton's antislavery protest, Adah Isaacs Menken's neglected free verse, Paul Laurence Dunbar's metapoetic labor, and Jean Toomer's didactic meditations. These four chapters are grounded on a new framework for poetic identity that retheorizes the function of the poetic speaker, or persona, which gives a poem its central identity. Historically, persona has functioned as a masking device and marks an enduring problem in lyric theory that tends to conflate the identity of the poet with his/her constructed poetic identities. Persona in African American Poetry uses this conflation to explain something fundamental about black poetic expression: if the guiding principle and conventional wisdom of African American literary studies tends toward binaries—between authenticity and imitation, or white standards and black discourse—this dissertation shows, contrariwise, how black poets actually turned to more complicated stances and multiple identities. Persona in African American Poetry thus addresses the politics of canonization, recovering personae that have been excluded from criticism and pedagogy because they often contradict and complicate our understanding of a "racially authentic" black literature.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Licato, Amanda Mehsima |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Degree supervisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Thesis advisor | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Degree committee member | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Amanda Mehsima Licato. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Amanda Licato
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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