Academic literature on the topic 'English poetry – black authors'

Black queer feminist literature remains under-researched. This reflects the societal marginalisation of black queer authors in South Africa. Our article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of black queer women by black queer and cisgender authors in selected isiXhosa and English poetry. The poems selected are from Unam Wena (2021) by Mthunzikazi Mbungwana and red cotton (2018) by vangile gantsho. Firstly, we explore how queer feminism is captured from a Xhosa perspective. Secondly, we explore how English is used to expose readers to black queerness, and, thirdly, we question how literary scholarship influences or limits black queer feminist literature and the functionality of queer feminist poetry as representations of black women. Discourse theory is used to examine how authors of the selected poetry construct knowledge about black queerness from a feminist perspective and shape how people understand it. In this article we adopt a narrative enquiry within the constructionism paradigm with qualitative textual analysis. Our analysis of the poetry reveals that, although the selected poets use two different languages, the same protest voice is foregrounded, with observable differences being primarily technical—namely how form, sound, and structure are employed to set the tone and mood in the issues addressed.

Polysemy is a phenomenon peculiar to almost all languages. In each lexical unit, a certain thought is encoded, which can be deciphered only with the help of context. In this case, the external expression of the figurative content of the adjective denoting black is its unusual, non-standard compatibility with other words. When used with different nouns, a word can acquire different meanings that are unrelated to the color designation. The figurative determinant comes to life and makes the word semantically capacious, saturated with various overtones, sometimes even with the opposite meaning.Thus, the Kazakh language is characterized by neoplasms based on the active use of words with the meaning of the color "kara" (black). The symbolism of black color in the Kazakh language finds correspondence with both negative connotations – evil, darkness, grief, lies, difficulties, treachery, betrayal, and with positive ones – goodness, solidity, stability, power, strength, expressive beauty. The symbolism of black is very nuanced in many languages.The article shows how in the educational process of a pedagogical university, during the teaching of philological disciplines, the subject of the polysemy of the adjective "black" can be used. The authors give examples from phraseology, onomastics, poetry and prose in Kazakh, Russian, German and English.

The Early New English iambic pentameter was re-created by Wyatt and Surrey in the first half of the 16th c. Surrey introduced blank iambic pentameter into English poetry, and the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, was written in this versification form. Early New English playwrights were feeling their way into the iambic meter, and wrote “by the foot”: the mean stressing on even syllables reached 90 percent, while on the odd syllables it fell to 5 percent. The authors of first new English tragedies were members of the parliament or the gentlemen of the City Inns, and they wrote for the aristocratic audience and the Court. Their subject matter and their characters matched the verse form: they were stiff and stilted.Marlowe and Kyd represented a new generation of playwrights who wrote for the commercial stage patronized by commoners. Marlowe and Kyd created different sets of plots and personages and a different versification style. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy had a powerful impact on generations of English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Shirley. The particulars of the Earlier New English versification style compared to later Elizabethan dramaturgy are discussed in the presentation.

A different name than English literature, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, was given to the body of literature in English that emerged on account of the British interaction with India unlike the case with their interaction with America or Australia or New Zealand. Even the Indians’ contributions (translations as well as creative pieces in English) were classed under the caption ‘Anglo-Indian’ initially but later a different name, ‘Indo-Anglian’, was conceived for the growing variety and volume of writings in English by the Indians. However, unlike the former the latter has not found a favour with the compilers of English dictionaries. With the passage of time the fine line of demarcation drawn on the basis of subject matter and author’s point of view has disappeared and currently even Anglo-Indians’ writings are classed as ‘Indo-Anglian’. Besides contemplating on various connotations of the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ the article discusses the related issues such as: the etymology of the term, fixing the name of its coiner and the date of its first use. In contrast to the opinions of the historians and critics like K R S Iyengar, G P Sarma, M K Naik, Daniela Rogobete, Sachidananda Mohanty, Dilip Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak it has been brought to light that the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ was first used in 1880 by James Payn to refer to the Indians’ writings in English rather pejoratively. However, Iyengar used it in a positive sense though he himself gave it up soon. The reasons for the wide acceptance of the term, sometimes also for the authors of the sub-continent, by the members of academia all over the world, despite its rejection by Sahitya Akademi (the national body of letters in India), have also been contemplated on. References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. (1970). Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Mysore: Literary Half-yearly, University of Mysore, University of Mysore Press. Amanuddin, Syed. (2016 [1990]). “Don’t Call Me Indo-Anglian”. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Ed.), An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry. Bengaluru: Trinity Press. B A (Compiler). (1883). Indo-Anglian Literature. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=rByZ2RcSBTMC&pg=PA1&source= gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false ---. (1887). “Indo-Anglian Literature”. 2nd Issue. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/60238178 Basham, A L. (1981[1954]). The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims. Indian Rpt, Calcutta: Rupa. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/TheWonderThatWasIndiaByALBasham Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Peacock Lute. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Moving Finger. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Boria, Cavellay. (1807). “Account of the Jains, Collected from a Priest of this Sect; at Mudgeri: Translated by Cavelly Boria, Brahmen; for Major C. Mackenzie”. Asiatick Researches: Or Transactions of the Society; Instituted In Bengal, For Enquiring Into The History And Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 9, 244-286. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.104510 Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary [The]. (1971). Bombay et al: Allied Publishers. Print. Chatterjee, Dilip Kumar. (1989). Cousins and Sri Aurobindo: A Study in Literary Influence, Journal of South Asian Literature, 24(1), 114-123. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40873985. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. (1988). A Study of the Works of James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan. PDF. Retrieved from: http://ir.inflibnet. ac.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10603/68500/9/09_chapter%205.pdf. Cobuild English Language Dictionary. (1989 [1987]). rpt. London and Glasgow. Collins Cobuild Advanced Illustrated Dictionary. (2010). rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins. Print. Concise Oxford English Dictionary [The]. (1961 [1951]). H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. (Eds.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 4th ed. Cousins, James H. (1921). Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies. Madras: Ganesh & Co. n. d., Preface is dated April, 1921. PDF. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/uc1.$b683874 ---. (1919) New Ways in English Literature. Madras: Ganesh & Co. 2nd edition. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31747 ---. (1918). The Renaissance in India. Madras: Madras: Ganesh & Co., n. d., Preface is dated June 1918. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.203914 Das, Sisir Kumar. (1991). History of Indian Literature. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Encarta World English Dictionary. (1999). London: Bloomsbury. Gandhi, M K. (1938 [1909]). Hind Swaraj Tr. M K Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Gokak, V K. (n.d.). English in India: Its Present and Future. Bombay et al: Asia Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460832 Goodwin, Gwendoline (Ed.). (1927). Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176578 Guptara, Prabhu S. (1986). Review of Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: A Guide to Information Sources. The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 311–13. PDF. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507834 Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. (1945). Indian Contribution to English Literature [The]. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/ indiancontributi030041mbp ---. (2013 [1962]). Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling. ---. (1943). Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay: PEN & International Book House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/IndoAnglianLiterature Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (2003). Essex: Pearson. Lyall, Alfred Comyn. (1915). The Anglo-Indian Novelist. Studies in Literature and History. London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.94619 Macaulay T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education dated the 2nd February 1835. HTML. Retrieved from: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2003). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. ---. (2003[1992]). The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford U P. Minocherhomji, Roshan Nadirsha. (1945). Indian Writers of Fiction in English. Bombay: U of Bombay. Modak, Cyril (Editor). (1938). The Indian Gateway to Poetry (Poetry in English), Calcutta: Longmans, Green. PDF. Retrieved from http://en.booksee.org/book/2266726 Mohanty, Sachidananda. (2013). “An ‘Indo-Anglian’ Legacy”. The Hindu. July 20, 2013. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article 4927193.ece Mukherjee, Sujit. (1968). Indo-English Literature: An Essay in Definition, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur and S. K. Desai. Dharwad: Karnatak University. Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt.New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles [The], (1993). Ed. Lesley Brown, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt. Oaten, Edward Farley. (1953 [1916]). Anglo-Indian Literature. In: Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 14, (pp. 331-342). A C Award and A R Waller, (Eds). Rpt. ---. (1908). A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature, London: Kegan Paul. PDF. Retrieved from: https://ia600303.us.archive.org/0/items/sketchofangloind00oateuoft/sketchofangloind00oateuoft.pdf) Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (1979 [1974]). A. S. Hornby (Ed). : Oxford UP, 3rd ed. Oxford English Dictionary [The]. Vol. 7. (1991[1989]). J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Pai, Sajith. (2018). Indo-Anglians: The newest and fastest-growing caste in India. Web. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/magazine/867130/indo-anglians-the-newest-and-fastest-growing-caste-in-india Pandia, Mahendra Navansuklal. (1950). The Indo-Anglian Novels as a Social Document. Bombay: U Press. Payn, James. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 246(1791):370-375. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/gentlemansmagaz11unkngoog#page/ n382/mode/2up. ---. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, Littell’s Living Age (1844-1896), 145(1868): 49-52. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_ djvu.txt. Rai, Saritha. (2012). India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation. Retrieved from: https://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/indias-new-english-only-generation/ Raizada, Harish. (1978). The Lotus and the Rose: Indian Fiction in English (1850-1947). Aligarh: The Arts Faculty. Rajan, P K. (2006). Indian English literature: Changing traditions. Littcrit. 32(1-2), 11-23. Rao, Raja. (2005 [1938]). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford UP. Rogobete, Daniela. (2015). Global versus Glocal Dimensions of the Post-1981 Indian English Novel. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4378/4589. Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West. (Eds.) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 – 1997. London: Vintage. Sampson, George. (1959 [1941]). Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [The]. Cambridge: UP. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.18336. Sarma, Gobinda Prasad. (1990). Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Singh, Kh. Kunjo. (2002). The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2012). How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sturgeon, Mary C. (1916). Studies of Contemporary Poets, London: George G Hard & Co., Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95728. Thomson, W S (Ed). (1876). Anglo-Indian Prize Poems, Native and English Writers, In: Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to India. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., Retrieved from https://books.google.co.in/ books?id=QrwOAAAAQAAJ Wadia, A R. (1954). The Future of English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wadia, B J. (1945). Foreword to K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/indiancontributi030041mbp Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. (1989). New York: Portland House. Yule, H. and A C Burnell. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. W. Crooke, Ed. London: J. Murray. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/hobsonjobsonagl00croogoog Sources www.amazon.com/Indo-Anglian-Literature-Edward-Charles-Buck/dp/1358184496 www.archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_djvu.txt www.catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001903204?type%5B%5D=all&lookfor%5B%5D=indo%20anglian&ft= www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.L._Indo_Anglian_Public_School,_Aurangabad www.everyculture.com/South-Asia/Anglo-Indian.html www.solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=true&mode=Basic&tab=local&indx=1&dum=true&srt=rank&vid=OXVU1&frbg=&tb=t&vl%28freeText0%29=Indo-Anglian+Literature+&scp.scps=scope%3A%28OX%29&vl% 28516065169UI1%29=all_items&vl%281UIStartWith0%29=contains&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any&vl%28254947567UI0%29=title&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any www.worldcat.org/title/indo-anglian-literature/oclc/30452040

The objectives of this study are: (1) To know students’ ability in reading English Poetry. (2) To know the difficulties that the student find in reading English Poetry. The data was analyzed by using a quantitative descriptive method. The study data was collected by using some research instruments, such as reading test and interview. The data were tabulated into students’ average scores in five indicators and mean scores. Then, the authors explained the data descriptively. Based on the data findings, the students’ ability to read English Poetry was qualified as “poor”. This was indicated by the score in each part of the students were low, especially in facial expression and body language. Through this study, the authors aimed to help the student to learn how to read English Poetry, and the students hoped to increase their ability to read English Poetry.

The paper seeks to revive the interest of teachers and learners in poetry reading and writing as a means to teach English at intermediate and advanced levels. The paper demonstrates the results of the authors’ classroom experience during the enforced lockdown of 2020 in integrating poetry into English language class. The paper looks at poetry as a teaching tool and a coping strategy for students facing the negative consequences of the pandemic. First, the authors analyse the COVID-related poetry in English and Russian. They identify the key emotions people had been experiencing during the pandemic by finding key words, symbols and stylistic devices. The inclusion of English and Russian pieces provides certain culture specific interpretations of the new reality. Further, the authors analyze poems written in English by their students and assess the creative activity in terms of a coping strategy. The authors conclude that, provided the students are given examples of various genres, the activity enables them to reconsider their attitude to the pandemic in a constructive way. In more general terms, the authors conclude that the regular inclusion of poetry practices in English language classes can create a healthy and dynamic atmosphere which in turn may contribute to enhancing the teaching efficiency.

Studies of the New Negro Renaissance have long emphasized the emergence in black poetry of the vernacular and of folk-oriented rhythms in particular. Sterling Brown's critical work and poetry show, however, that traditional English meters had a central role in the discourse and poetics of New Negro poetry. Reading his 1931 Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes together with James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) suggests that these meters counteracted dominant racialized ideas about black bodies, rhythms, and song. The polymetrical surface of Brown's own early poem “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home” (1927) reveals that Brown treated iambic pentameter as a vernacular form, destabilizing entrenched divisions between conventional and innovative, white and black, past and present. Future studies of black poetry might therefore look to prosodic hybridity as a powerful critique of audience ideology.

From the present-day perspective Harlem Renaissance poetry represents an epoch-making contribution by America's black authors to the mainstream literature. However, in the post World War 1 era black authors struggled for recognition in their homeland. The publication of a German anthology Afrika singt in the late 1920s agitated Europe as well as the German-speaking authors in Slovenia. Mile Klopčič, a representative of the poetry of Social Realism, translated a handful of Har­ lem Renaissance poems into Slovene using, except in two cases, the German anthology as a source text. His translations are formally accomplished but fail to reproduce the cultural significance of the Harlem Renaissance poetry.

The article juxtaposes three different English translations of two Ilse Aichinger’s poems – prepared by Michael Hamburger, James C. Alldridge and by the authors of the article, Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm. Görtschacher and Malcolm draw our attention to a special feature of Aichinger’s poems – their conciseness, and to the problems this quality may pose to the process of translation. The article examines predominantly semantic, syntactic, and cultural differences between German and English equivalents proposed by the three (four) translators, but also emphasizes the fact that translation is never fi nished, only published.

The Dark Brother. Swedish Negrophilia in 1957 This article sheds new light on the Swedish introduction of poetry written in French, Spanish and Portuguese by black authors and/or on »black« topics. More specifically, the article discusses Artur Lundkvist’s anthology Den mörke brodern (‘The darker brother’), published in 1957. It analyzes the title, foreword, selection and translations included in the anthology and relates these to international models of the time and to a Swedish essay on poetry written by black authors published in 1960. Lundkvist’s approach is found to be more negrophile and exotizising than the international models and the Swedish essay.

Bibliography: p. 362-393.
In this thesis, the discussion of South African English poetry is undertaken in terms of critical questions to which the body of work, to date, has not been subjected. In the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, several anthologies of South African English poetry were published which, despite their differing foci, attested to the strength, innovation, and international stature of the work. Their editors made claims which emphasised both the importance of Sowetan poetry and the emancipation of white poetry, particularly in the last three decades, from the legacy of a stultifying colonial past. This thesis sets out to examine the validity of these critical evaluations. The impetus for such an examination is threefold. Firstly, in comparison with a world literature, South African English poetry has had little impact on the kinds of aesthetic questions which have led to the radical work of international figures like Milosz, Walcott, Neruda. Secondly, South African English poetry tends to be bifurcated by critical analysis, both locally and internationally, into the work of black poets and the work of white poets. Despite the realities of social history which have indeed dichotomised the human experience of South Africa in racial terms, this dichotomy does not seem the most fertile assumption from which to approach the achievement of a nation's poetry. Thirdly, as a poet himself, the writer of this thesis embarked upon the scholarly analysis of a poetic ancestry to which his own work looked ,in vain for location. The re-examination of the roots and value of South African English poetry begins in the thesis with the dilemmas posed by a legacy of romanticism in its displaced relation to a British colony. From this point the discussion argues that this legacy is visible in the unsatisfactory work of liberal poets in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and argues that such choices cannot be nourishing to a South African cultural originality. Turning to the work most forcefully emphasised as culturally original - i.e. the work of the Soweto poets in the nineteen-seventies and after - the thesis explores this poetry's claims to stylistic and conceptual innovation. The poetry of the late eighties is then examined in relation to its desire to support, and even to drive, anti-apartheid philosophy and practice. The conclusions of the final chapter, presaged throughout the entire argument, suggest that earlier critical estimations of South African English poetry ignore crucial aspects of what has usually been meant by a fully achieved poetic tradition and that such neglect amounts to the betrayal of the very meaning of the term "poem".

This thesis considers the idea of the 'metaphysical' in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury women's poetry, notably by exploring the female-voiced lyrics affiliated with Marie Maitland (d. 1596) in the Scottish manuscript verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto (c. 1586). The study aims to reintegrate important strands of Renaissance culture which have been lost by too exclusive a focus on English, male writing and contexts. For many literary historians the 'metaphysical' refers overwhelmingly to Dryden's pejorative categorization of Donne and his followers. However, Sarah Hutton has recently shown how the 'metaphysical' can be traced to an Aristotelian Neoplatonism, whereby influential fifteenth-century thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino were conflating the spiritual and material for political purposes. For the queer Renaissance critic, Michael Morgan Holmes, the 'political' pertains to individual spiritual-material desires which can undermine hegemonic definitions of the natural and unnatural. Building on this, my thesis illuminates 'metaphysics' in the work of Maitland, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Constance Aston Fowler (1621?-1664) and Katherine Philips (1632- 1664). These poets use the physical and spiritual bonds between women to explore the nature of female space, time and identity. Hutton's and Holmes's definition of the 'metaphysical' has special applicability for these poets, as they tacitly deconstruct the patriarchal construction of the virgin/whore and offer their own configuration of the spiritual-sensual woman. While critics have foregrounded a male metaphysical tradition in the early modern period, this study proposes that there is a 'dissident' female metaphysical strand that challenges the 'dominant' male discourses of the time. Over the last few decades, feminist scholars, notably, Lorna Hutson, Barbara Lewalski, Kate Chedgzoy, Carol Barash and Valerie Traub have reinstated the work of Lanyer and Philips in the English canon of Renaissance writing. More recently Sarah Dunnigan has drawn attention to the importance of the Scots poet and compiler, Maitland. Moreover, Helen Hackett has indicated that the writings of Fowler force us to rethink the roles of women in early modern literary culture. I take this further in two ways. First, I examine these poets' relationship to the 'metaphysical', the importance of which has been underestimated by critics, despite Dryden's original gendered use of the term. Secondly, I propose that these writers are responding to a 'polyglottal' female metaphysical tradition that develops in Renaissance Europe through a female republic of letters. I also assess the difficulties in belonging to a 'female tradition' in an era where female authorship was necessarily affected by misogynistic attitudes to women as writers. The research re-contextualizes the work of these women by examining the philosophical ideologies of Aristotle, Ficino, Marguerite of Navarre, Donne, Sir Richard Maitland, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville, Olympia Morata, Herbert Aston, Katherine Thimelby, St Teresa of Ávila and Andrew Marvell. By juxtaposing these four poets and reading them from within this philosophical-political context, the thesis sheds new light on the nature of early modern female intertextuality, whilst challenging male Anglocentric definitions of the 'Renaissance'.

A review of contemporary South African and European critical approaches 'to "Soweto poetry" is undertaken to evaluate their efficacy in addressing the diverse and complex dynamics evident in the poetry. A wide selection of poetry from the 1970's and early 1980's is used to argue that none of the critical models provide an adequate methodology free from both pseudo-cultural or ideological assumptions, and "reader-grid"(imposition of external categories upon the poems).From this point of entry, three groups of critics with similar approaches are assessed in relation to Soweto poetry. The second chapter illustrates the deficiency in critical method- ology of the first group of critics, who rely on a politicizing approach. Their critique presupposes a coherent shift in the nature of Black Consciousness poetry in the 1970's, which is shown to be vague and problematic, especially when they attempt to categorize Soweto poetry into "consistently thematic" divisions. In the third chapter, it is argued that ideological approaches to Soweto poetry are impressionistic assessments that depend heavily on the subordination of aesthetic determinants to materialistic concerns. The critics in this second group draw a dubious distinction between bourgeois and "worker poetry" and ignore the inter- play between the two styles. Pluralized mergings within other epistemological spectrums are also ignored, showing an obsessive materialist bias. The fourth chapter examines the linguistic approach of the third group of critics. It is argued that they evaluate the poetry in terms of a defined critical terminology which assumes an established set of evaluative criteria exist. This is seen to be empiricist and deficient in wider social concerns. In the final chapter, it is submitted that each of the critical approaches examined foregrounds its own methodology, often ignoring the cohabitation of different systems of thought. In conclusion it is argued that a critical approach can only aspire to the formulation of a "black aesthetic" if it traces the mosaic of cultural borrowings, detours and connections that permeate Soweto poetry. Michel Serres, with his post-deconstructionist "approach", is presented as the closest aspirant. Bibliography: pages 117-123.

This thesis discusses Langston Hughes’ poetry and details the African-American experience in a discriminatory society which was an essential theme of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement which enriched American life. Hughes’ body of work covers the entire range of the human experience, especially the experience of ordinary people. He believed that the role of the artist was to cover and illuminate every aspect of people’s lives. Part of this expansive philosophy towards art included giving a voice to African-American women and men who experienced both racist and patriarchal oppression.

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

AbstractDiscussing Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation and Bleak House in conjunction with Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands this chapter traces a crucial shift in mid-nineteenth-century literature which consolidates British imperialism via “enlightened” differentiation from the United States and culminates in the more paternalistic rhetoric following the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. While travelling both authors construct conciliatory images of the English home that do not overtly challenge the sensibilities of the British reading audience. In her travel account, Seacole utilises a confident tone often directly addressing her readers more familiarly than the Black authors before her. Dickens too uses excessive overt narrative comment to promote an idea of a shared sense of indignation at lacking American manners in his travelogue and at the misguided international philanthropy of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Both their consolidating tonalities rest less on complex introspection than on an explicit reassuring British familiarity. However, while Dickens increasingly understands British familial feeling as tied to whiteness, Seacole contests such racialised conceptions of national belonging.

This chapter explores the impact of losing one’s language due to colonial violence and missionary education in black communities in South Africa. The author knits multi-generational conversations together in poetry to reflect on how the unapologetic imposition of English unravels linguistic threads which connect her to women in her community. The poetry is divided into three sections, Death, Mourning, and The unveiling, to mirror burial rituals in isiXhosa communities, and thus the occupation of the hybrid space between life and death, not of the body, but the tongue.

Abstract This chapter discusses authors who write about Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latin Americans who write about people of African descent. The title reflects a cultural norm that groups all writers under a national category and considers a contemporary trend to support authors of African descent to tell their own stories. The essay beings with the Cuban antislavery narrative; it situates the enslaved poet Juan Francisco Manzano, the first and only enslaved in Latin America to write his Autobiografía, as a central pillar. It continues with an analysis of the most important white and black authors in the various countries with significant black populations in Spanish America and Spanish descendants in the United States. The study presents, analyzes, and problematizes the two perspectives mentioned in the title and how early white authors were the first to write about the black protagonist. Black authors offered a different and more personal outlook. But even so, some of them supported a national discourse that moves away from a black or African based cultural view, epitomized by the mulatto. The United States is home to the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, and it also produces a literature by and about Hispanics in Spanish and with Latinx in English. Starting in the nineteenth century, writers living in the United States wrote about enslaved people of their country of origin and considers that this other geographic space is also present in their works. It concludes with how Latinx authors, those born or raised in the United States, write about the culture of their parents and the one of their new homelands, and how Afro-Latinx authors negotiate African cultural and religious spaces and contribute to a hybrid, twenty-first century literature.

The year 2020 is one not so fondly to be remembered by many. That is when the global pandemic of COVID-19 hit the world. Coupled with that, a wave of protests arose in the United States of America after the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white officer. The entire world had to deal with questioning their inner selves about how they treat each other racially. These events have been exhausting. Finding an outlet has been a preoccupation of many. Poetry is one of the greatest forms of expressive writing that can be used as therapy in times of crisis and can be healing to the person writing. In this chapter, the author showcases her original poetry written during these times of crisis. It is an autoethnographic study where she discusses poetry using relevant scholarship. The work will be relevant to teachers and students in upper secondary literature and college English classrooms as a tool on how to handle crisis through writing.

Abstract Contemporary African poetry remains implicated in the life of politics and the fate of nations with a fixity of concern not found in Asia or the Caribbean. The end of colonialism was followed in most African countries by decades of native misrule. For three generations, African poets have given voice to a wide range of experiences, always conscious that their use of English links them across regional boundaries, while they present the language with the challenge of dealing with the local in all its uniqueness, in circumstances ravaged by civil war, natural disasters, human greed, and political misrule.

In this position statement, the authors write in support of Ebonics (also known as African American Vernacular English, Black English, Black Dialect, and African American Language) as a legitimate language. The linguistic and cultural origins of Ebonics is traced, along with its legitimacy by professional organizations and the courts. CABE asserts that the role of schools and teachers is therefore to build on students’ knowledge of Ebonics rather than replace or eradicate Ebonics as they teach standard English. This position statement has implications for teacher training.