Blog 6

For our piece of pure theory we used the book A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, to use for our theoretical framework. Our group is working on the African American criticism which from the book it explains it is an attack on white superiority , and folkloric conception of humankind. The theory states it can be divided into various periods which go through out the Colonial times all the way to Contemporary. In this book it introduces many African American writers including the first African American women author ; Linda Brent. There are also many other notable authors who contributed to this type of criticism through out the history and the development of this criticism. It was not till after the mid 1900's that this type of theory became more mainstream especially after certain movements in black culture made it flourish even more.


Ralph Ellison is mentioned quite a bit in this book and is seen as a highly distinguished black author of his time who wrote, "Invisible Man". This is great for our group since we are using "Battle Royal" which is part of the same story as mentioned earlier. He wrote this novel and is basically dealing with how a young black man is trying to come to terms with his past and the past of his race. This criticism deals with the return of folkloric sources of African American culture into the writing. We can definitely use background information on the author and certain historical events going on that might have influenced his story which ties in really well with this criticism in our presentation.