My Account Wish List
Advanced Search
Print - Close Window
www.greenwood.com/catalog/GM1068.aspx
All Greenwood Products
Mythatypes Signatures and Signs of African/Diaspora and Black Goddesses
(Click to Enlarge)
Alexis Brooks De Vita
Foreword by Ralph J. Hexter
Book Code: GM1068
ISBN: 0-313-31068-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31068-3
200 pages, selected bibliography
Greenwood Press
Publication: 6/30/2000
List Price: $115.00 (UK Sterling Price: £65.00)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies
Series Number: 198
Reviews:
  • [T]he work represents groundbreaking research.
    —Choice
  • ...remarkable for its impressive scope of knowledge, particularly in the area of African lore and literature.
    —Research in African Literature
  • A complex, in-depth survey, Mythatypes is highly recommended for college-level students of African literary roots.
    —The Midwest Book Review
Description: Dr. Alexis Brooks De Vita takes up the challenge to develop culturally relevant modes of literary analysis of African/Diaspora literatures by identifying traditional African and Diaspora figures of myth, religion, legend, and history that interact with African and Diaspora literary heroines and their authors. Following upon Karla Holloway's arguments in Moorings and Metaphors that African American and West African women share strong traits of storytelling that both isolate and identify their literatures, Brooks De Vita traces these traits to their religious, legendary, and historical sources, identifying African and Diaspora female figures of power whose interaction with literary protagonists places personal stories among the collective historical and spiritual African/Diaspora experience, broadening and deepening each authorial voice by demonstrating how it breaks free of the European perspective of linear time and resonates in a timeless community whose members ceaselessly interact. African/Diaspora women's symbols of power assert their autonomous definitions of good and evil, enabled by decolonialist analysis as expounded by theorists such as Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike to be separated from universalizing, Eurocentric or masculinist assessments. Symbols of inherent, rootedness and empowerment are clearly identified, allowing the reader to perceive tales of salvation and success underlying and further developing literal tales of suffering, surrender, or loss. Will be of particular interest to students, scholars, and researchers of comparative literature as well as African American literature and African/Diaspora and Women's Studies.
Table of Contents:
  • Foreword
  • Introduction: Reading African/Diaspora Women's Mythatypes
  • Trees as Spiritual Mothers
  • She Who Nurtures and Devours
  • Child Sacrifice and Salvation
  • Rape and Rage
  • Air and Fire, Bringing Rain
  • Cruelty, Castration, and Claiming
  • The River and the Wall
  • Conclusion: This Moment of Epiphany
  • Bibliography
  • Afterword
  • Index
LC Card Number: 99-056463
LCC Class: PL8010
Dewey Class: 809
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1999-2008 Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
88 Post Road West, Westport CT 06881, (203) 226-3571