Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature - Softcover

Holloway, Karla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081351746X ISBN 13: 9780813517469

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Moorings and Metaphors is one of the first studies to examine the ways that cultural tradition is reflected in the language and figures of black women's writing. In a discussion that includes the works of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, Buchi Emecheta, Octavia Butler, Efua Sutherland, and Gayl Jones, and with a particular focus on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Flora Nwapa's Efuru, Holloway follows the narrative structures, language, and figurative metaphors of West African goddesses and African-American ancestors as they weave through the pages of these writers' fiction. She explores what she would call the cultural and gendered essence of contemporary literature that has grown out of the African diaspora.Proceeding from a consideration of the imaginative textual languages of contemporary African-American and West African writers, Holloway asserts the intertextuality of black women's literature across two continents. She argues the subtext of

About this title

About the Author:

Karla F. C. Holloway is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. She is the author of The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston, and co-author of New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 081351746X
• ISBN 13: 9780813517469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218