Maya Angelou's I Know why the Caged Bird Sings: A CasebookJoanne M. Braxton With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. Perhaps more than any other single text, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings helped to establish the "mainstream" status of the renaissance in black women's writing. This casebook presents a variety of critical approaches to this classic autobiography, along with an exclusive interview with Angelou conducted specially for this volume and a unique drawing of her childhood surroundings in Stamps, Arkansas, drawn by Angelou herself. |
Contents
Initiation and SelfDiscovery | 21 |
Racial Protest Identity | 77 |
Death as Metaphor of Self III | 111 |
An Interview | 149 |
Selected Bibliography | 159 |
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Common terms and phrases
adult African African-American Afro-American Angelou's autobiography Angelou's I Know Annie Henderson Arensberg Arkansas autobi autobiography beauty bildungsroman Black American black community black female body Black Women Writers BRAXTON Brent's Caged Bird Sings chapter child childhood church Claudia Tate confrontation critics Cudjoe Cullinan culture dentist episode experience fantasy fear feel Flowers Freeman Gabriel Prosser Gather gelou Grandmother Henderson grandmother's guerite Harriet Jacobs Ibid identity interview Jacobs Jacobs's Joe Louis Karen Fields language literary literature lives Louis Lucrece Marguerite Maya Angelou Maya Angelou's Maya's memory Momma Henderson mother narrative narrator never ography oppression painful passage poet power of words powhitetrash Press protest racial racist rape Richard Wright Rosa Guy scene sexual somatophobia Southern literature Stamps story subtle resistance Swingin tell theme tion tradition Traveling Shoes Uncle Willie Univ Vivian Baxter Wake Forest University white girls whitefolks woman York young Maya