Research Catalog

Title

No crystal stair : visions of race and gender in Black women's fiction / Gloria Wade-Gayles.

Author

Gayles, Gloria Jean Wade.

Publication

Cleveland, Ohio : Pilgrim Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxxii, 251 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• In this revised edition, Gloria Wade-Gayles analyzes selected novels by such writers as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy West, and Gayl Jones to offer a fresh vision of the roles - and burdens - of black women in contemporary culture.
• Contending that black women are "twice burdened" and "doubly invisible" because of their race and gender. Wade-Gayles pulls us into the lives of these fascinating characters to reveal black women as they really are - struggling against isolation, alienation, loneliness, and victimization, all the while seeking wider horizons for their people and space for themselves as persons with aspirations and dreams.
• No Crystal Stair is a celebration of black women writers and their collective vision of the human condition.

Subjects

• African Americans in literature
• American fiction > African American authors > History and criticism
• American fiction > Women authors > History and criticism
• Sex role in literature
• Race relations in literature
• African American women in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction to the First Edition / Beverly Guy-Sheftall -- A Personal Response / Zillah Eisenstein -- 1. The Narrow Space of Race, the Dark Enclosure of Sex: The Case for This Book -- 2. A Historical Overview: Black Women in White America, 1946-1976 -- 3. The Halo and the Hardships: Black Women as Mothers and Sometimes as Wives -- 4. "Going Nowhere Immediate": Black Women of Hopelessness -- 5. "Journeying from Can't to Can" and Sometimes Back to "Can't": Black Women of Challenge and Contradiction -- 6. Giving Birth to Self: The Quests for Wholeness of Sula Mae Peace and Meridian Hill -- 7. The Space and the Enclosure: The Collective Vision of Black Women -- Afterword / Alton Hornsby, Jr.

ISBN

0829811516 (alk. paper)

LCCN

96047198

OCLC

ocm35750504

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries