Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination - Softcover

Lively, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099485516 ISBN 13: 9780099485513

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination

About this title

About the Author:

Adam Lively is a well-known critic, novelist, and broadcaster. He was born in Swansea and studied history and philosophy in England and America. He is the author of four novels, Blue Fruit, The Burnt House, The Snail, and Sing the Body Electric, as well as a pamphlet, Parliament: The Great British Democracy Swindle. Mr. Lively lives in London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A comprehensive, if meandering, survey of black peoples in Western literature. Novelist and critic Lively (Blue Fruit, 1989) ranges all over the map, painting his literary study in encyclopedic brush strokes. From a fascinating segment on the African origins of the French harlequin figure, to an illuminating discourse on the role of Darwins theories in 19th-century conceptions of race, to the Harlem Renaissance, to a comfortably erudite discussion of jazz, to a perceptive review of James Baldwins relationship with Richard Wright, the author shows how time and again throughout history, attitudes on race, as exemplified especially in literature, tend to persist despite their transformation into different forms. But this unexceptionable premise raises the question, Wheres the argument? Although initially Lively attacks what he claims are simplistic criticisms of the 19th centurys racist science, he never develops that theme further. Later he suggests that vestiges of abolitionism survive in the writing of John Updike and Bernard Malamud, yet again the point disappears before being fully outlined. Sometimes Livelys ruminations are thought-provoking, as when he contends that as with fascism, [Joseph] Conrads nihilism is a nihilism without the courage of its own lack of convictions. Such moments, however, frequently occur far into tangents that leave racial issues behind. Lively often provocatively links numerous subjects, as he does with jazz, Ralph Ellison, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., but his discussions too often wander, in this case to an extended consideration of Sartre and black writers from French West Africa and the Caribbean. While Livelys wide research and keen eye illuminate almost every corner of the nettlesome issue of race, he never discloses more generally disturbing, encouraging, or singular trends in literature by and about blacks. An omnibus treatment of literary blackness, replete with detail, lacking in focus. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0099485516
• ISBN 13: 9780099485513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 295