Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature [Hardcover]

Gene Andrew Jarrett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0812239733 | ISBN-13: 978-0812239737

"In Deans and Truants Gene Jarrett has inaugurated an entirely new approach to the subject of canon-formation in African American literature, insisting that we expand our definition of the tradition to include black authors who chose not to write about race and who, consequently, have often found their works uncollected and unanalyzed, if not severely critiqued. Jarrett's cogent and compelling argument is sure to generate debate and, ultimately, lead to a reconsideration of what, exactly, is 'African American' about African American literature. This is a very important book and marks the inaugural intervention of one of the major scholars and critics of African American literature of a new generation."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans--critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka--prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison--perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century--wrote literature anomalous to those standards.

Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif."

Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A richly textured study of theoretical conceptions of the African American canon as well as primary and secondary sources. --American Literature, June 2008

While challenging the standard notion of black literature, this readable, engaging work also provides insightful analyses of such understudied works as Morrison's short story 'Recitatif,' Yerby's historical novel The Foxes of Harrow, and Schuyler's satirical novel Black No More. --Choice

Selecting a wide range of writing, poetry, novels, short stories, satire, and criticism, Jarrett shows how the reception of certain authors and their texts has defined what is and is not considered African American literature to this day. . . . This book is well written and as nicely nuanced as the topic it addresses. --Journal of American Studies, August 2008

About the Author

Gene Andrew Jarrett teaches English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the editor of African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader and a coeditor of The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar. His articles have appeared in PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Callaloo.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (June 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812239733
• ISBN-13: 978-0812239737
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,533,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Boston University, with affiliate university appointments in African American Studies and American and New England Studies. Jarrett earned his A.B. in English from Princeton University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University. His scholarship focuses on African American literary history, particularly the longstanding struggles of African American writers with racial representation, or the responsibility of portraying race in culturally and politically progressive ways. Taken together, Jarrett's authored and edited books examine racial representation in African American literature from the 18th century to the present.

Jarrett is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York University Press, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

He is the editor of A Companion to African American Literature (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2010); Claude McKay's 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas Series, Rutgers University Press, 2007); and African American Literature beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (New York University Press, 2006).

He is also the co-editor of several books, including, with Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau, The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio University Press, 2009); with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton University Press, 2007); and with Thomas Lewis Morgan, The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio University Press, 2005; paperback 2009).

Jarrett has published scholarly essays and book reviews in a host of venues, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Publication of the Modern Language Association, American Literary History, African American Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, American Literary Realism, The Blackwell Concise Companion to American Fiction, and The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, among other academic journals and scholarly books.

Jarrett's scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and, most recently, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. As 2010 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in English Literature at Radcliffe, Jarrett began work on a definitive biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), looking at the literature, life, and times of the first professional African American writer, born in Dayton, Ohio.