{"product_id":"9781587291630","title":"Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1952 Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his Kafkaesque  and claustrophobic novel about the life of a nameless young black man in  New York City. Although \u003ci\u003eInvisible Man\u003c\/i\u003e has remained the only  novel that Ellison published in his lifetime, it is generally regarded  as one of the most important works of fiction in our century.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis new reading of a classic work examines Ellison's relation  to and critique of the American literary canon by demonstrating that the  pattern of allusions in \u003ci\u003eInvisible Man\u003c\/i\u003e forms a  literary-critical subtext which challenges the accepted readings of such  major American authors as Emerson, Melville, and Twain.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eModeling his argument on Foucault's analysis of the asylum,  Nadel analyzes the institution of the South to show how it moved blacks  from \"enslavement\" to \"slavery\" to \"invisibility\"—all in the interest of  maintaining an organization of power based on racial caste. He then  demonstrates the ways Ellison wrote in the modernist\/surreal tradition  to trace symbolically the history of blacks in America as they moved not  only from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and from the rural  South to the urban North, but as they moved (sometimes unnoticed)  through American fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is on this latter movement that Nadel focuses his criticism,  first demonstrating theoretically that allusions can impel  reconsideration of the alluded-to text and thus function as a form of  literary criticism, and then reading the specific criticism implied by  Ellison's allusions to Emerson's essays and Lewis Mumford's \u003ci\u003eThe Golden Days,\u003c\/i\u003e as well as to \"Benito Cereno\" and The \u003ci\u003eAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.\u003c\/i\u003e Nadel also considers Ellison's allusions to Whitman, Eliot, Joyce, and the New Testament.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eInvisible Criticism\u003c\/i\u003e will be of interest not only to  students of American and Afro-American literature but also to those  concerned about issues of literary theory, particularly in the areas of  intertextual relationships, canonicity, and rehistoricism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Iowa Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47133059809520,"sku":"9781587291630","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781587291630_p0.jpg?v=1763807649","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781587291630","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}