Richard Wright in Context

Thirty-three new essays on Richard Wright explore the crucial contexts of Wright's trailblazing literary career.

Michael Nowlin (Edited by)

9781108488952, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 July 2021

350 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.7 kg

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

Introduction: Richard Wright's Luck Michael Nowlin
Part I. Life and Career, Times and Places: 1. The Jim Crow South Thadious Davis
2. Chicago Liesl Olson
3. New York and Brooklyn Ayesha Hardison
4. Paris and Ailly William E. Dow
5. Globetrotting, 1949–1960 John Lowe
Part II. Social and Cultural Contexts: 6. Black Masculinity: Boyhood and Manhood Denied in Jim Crow America Joseph G. Ramsey
7. Wright and African American Women Shana A. Russell
8. He Tried to Be a Communist: Wright and the Black Literary Left Alan M. Wald
9. Liberalism and the Color Line John K. Young
10. 'The Same Stuff': Native Son and Press Coverage of the Robert Nixon Trial Jeannine Marie DeLombard
11. Moviegoer and Cinematic Seers Alice Mikal Craven
12. Fashion: Un/dressing Wright Paula Rabinowitz
13. 'Defeat Measured in the Jumping Cadences of Triumph': Wright's Engagement with Blues and Jazz Tim A. Ryan
14. Wright and Religion Jamall A. Calloway
15. Bandung and Third World Liberation Brian Russell Roberts
16. Black Paris, Hard-Boiled Paranoia, and the Cultural Cold War William J. Maxwell
Part III. Literary and Intellectual Contexts: 17. Chicago Sociology Christopher Douglas
18. 1930s Proletarian Fiction Anthony Dawahare
19. The Blues in Print: Wright's 'Blueprint for Negro Writing' Reconsidered Jesse McCarthy
20. Realism and Modernism, Solipsism and Solidarity Anne MacMaster and Anita DeRouen
21. The Literary Mainstream: Story and the Book-of-the-Month Club Laurence Cossu-Beaumont
22. Wright, Psychoanalysis, and Fredric Wertham's Reading of Hamlet Stephan Kuhl
23. Wright's Black Boy in Context Robert B. Stepto
24. Wright and Women Authors Noelle Morrissette
25. Existentialism Stephanie Li
26. Wright and Les Temps Modernes Michael Nowlin
27. Wright and Postcolonial Thought Joseph Keith
28. Modern Poetry and Haiku Anita Patterson
Part IV. Reputation and Critical Reception: 29. Wright's Many Lives and the Travails of Literary Biography Claudine Raynaud
30. Contemporary Reception Ian Afflerbach
31. Native Son on Stage and Screen Anna Shechtman
32. Wright's Critical Reputation, 1960–2019 Robert J. Butler
33. Richard Wright in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter: Two Views Barbara Foley and Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]