2024-01-31 18:09:56
Cairo: “The Gulf”
The National Center for Translation published the book “The Historical Novel among African-American Women Writers” by Ana Nunes, translated by Sharqawi Hafez. The book starts from the idea that the past will remain terrible as long as we refuse to represent it faithfully. African-American women writers set out to represent history, which aims to connect the past with the present, and the individual with society. .
In this context, history appears as an important means of cultural reconstruction, societal renewal, and self-discovery. The texts selected in this book represent African-American history written from a women’s perspective. Each work offers new narrative strategies for representing slavery, and works within a literary style that is reformulated and revised.
The central point of the novels of Toni Morrison, Phyllis Perry, Margaret Walker, Gayle Jones, and Charlie Annie Williams, for example, is to recontextualize the ancestral past. In their representation of the past, black women writers reclaim the oral methods developed and tested in the experience of slavery, and the history of oppression and adversity.
In the practice of reclaiming and reworking oral modes, they invoke their literary grandmothers, women whose works remained outside literary norms. African American writing in general remained buried in the dark, accessible only in research libraries or poorly edited, expensive second editions.
Many of these books were never reprinted, and yet, despite this discontinuity that has characterized Afro-American literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black women writers established and influenced a literary style for African-American women that must be revised, explained in detail, analyzed, and debated before we can fully understand it. The formal form of this method.
Through the roles of these women writers, as artists, lecturers, critics, biographers, and editors, women writers rediscovered and engaged with Afro-American literary traditions while shaping their new directions. In tracing the development of the representation of slavery from Walker’s “Jubilee” to Perry’s “Stigma,” it becomes clear how these narratives discussed , established an intertextual dialogue with other works in the African American literary tradition that focused on women’s perspectives on black history and suffering, while clarifying the importance of the legacies of twentieth-century black women writers.
This book aims to explore the ways in which African American women writers deal with the relationships between history and literature, re-observe history from the perspective of a female who has been silenced, and establish an unprecedented narrative of the American experience. The book does not aim to be an extensive overview of the novel. Historical studies in African-American literature published since 1966. Rather, the focus is on innovative narrative strategies in the selected novels.
These novels reformulate the European style of the historical novel in the nineteenth century, in order to compete with the historical texts issued by the control of the white man, and the African-American historical novel significantly combines historical research with fictional elements, to reshape the past, and therefore this group of novels gives privilege to the lives of the socially marginalized. , those who remained outside the pages of history.
In this context, literature becomes a means of reformulating “historical records” that have been destroyed or never existed at all, and a way of including the history of those who do not speak, in the American experience, those who did not have a voice because of terror.
The book broadly explores African-American historical novels written by women in the last four decades of the twentieth century, and refers to more than thirty women writers whose works have contributed to that legacy. The book concludes by exploring the social responsibility that each author embraced in crafting a historical novel that makes the present coherent.
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