Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism

This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.

Author: Eric D. LaMore
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 11/02/2007
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780299309800

About the Author
Eric D. Lamore is an associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He is the editor of Teaching Olaudah Equiano's Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives and coeditor of New Essays on Phillis Wheatley.