Search results for ""author james weldon""
Pan Macmillan The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a powerful, trailblazing novel that exposes the intricate relationship between race and class in late nineteenth-century America.Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Dr Sam Halliday.After losing his mother at a very young age, the narrator is thrust from his comfortable, middle-class environment, afforded by his distant but aristocratic father, into the wider world. His passion for music begins in Georgia’s all-black church community and takes him from New York, where he plays ragtime for a rich white gentleman, to the South, where he witnesses lynchings and out of fear gives up his passion, as well as his race, to pass for white. Relevant to this day, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an unflinching account of black experience in America.
£10.99
Medieval Institute Publications The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark
The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark brings together studies concerning heroes and heroisms in Old English, Old Icelandic, Middle English, and modern literature as a tribute to the scholarship and teaching of George Clark. The thirteen essays in this collection appear in print here for the first time.
£17.50
WW Norton & Co The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: A Norton Critical Edition
Known only as the “Ex-Colored Man,” the protagonist in Johnson’s novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or “passing” as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1912 text. It is accompanied by a detailed introduction, explanatory footnotes, and a note on the text. The appendices that follow the novel include materials available in no other edition: manuscript drafts of the final chapters, including the original lynching scene (chapter 10, ca. 1910) and the original ending (chapter 11, ca. 1908). An unusually rich selection of “Backgrounds and Sources” focuses on Johnson’s life; the autobiographical inspirations for The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; the cultural history of the era in which Johnson lived and wrote; the noteworthy reception history for the 1912, 1927, and 1948 editions; and related writings by Johnson. In addition to Johnson, contributors include Eugene Levy, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carl Van Vechten, Blanche W. Knopf, and Victor Weybright among others. The four critical essays and interpretations in this volume speak to The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’s major themes, among them irony, authorship, passing, and parody. Assessments are provided by Robert B. Stepto, M. Giulia Fabi, Siobhan B. Somerville, and Christina L. Ruotolo. A chronology of Johnson’s life and work and a selected bibliography are also included, as well as six images.
£15.65
Everyman The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to 'pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of Ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but colour.
£14.00
Medieval Institute Publications Lybeaus Desconus
Lybeaus Desconus (the Fair Unknown) is the mid-fourteenth-century Middle English version of the classic narrative of the handsome and mysterious young outsider who comes to the court of King Arthur to prove himself worthy of joining Arthur's knights. The young knight is tested in a variety of ways, and in the course of this testing he learns both chivalric codes of conduct and the truth of his parentage. Six extant manuscripts of the poem attest to its popularity, placing it in company with Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and Sir Isumbras among the most popular of Middle English Romances. The current edition offers readers a chance to compare two manuscript versions of the poem, one preserved in Lambeth MS 306 and the other in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples.
£13.21