Contributions by Jani L. Barker, Rudine Sims Bishop, Julia S. Charles-Linen, Paige Gray, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Jonda C. McNair, Sara C. VanderHaagen, and Michelle Taylor Watts The Brownies’ Book occupies a special place in the history of African American children’s literature. Informally the children’s counterpart to the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, it was one of the first periodicals created primarily for Black youth. Several of the objectives the creators delineated in 1919 when announcing the arrival of the publication—“To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race” and “To make colored children realize that being ‘colored’ is a beautiful, normal thing”—still resonate with contemporary creators, readers, and scholars of African American children’s literature. The meticulously researched essays in A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies’ Book" get to the heart of The Brownies’ Book “project” using critical approaches both varied and illuminating. Contributors to the volume explore the underappreciated role of Jessie Redmon Fauset in creating The Brownies’ Book and in the cultural life of Black America; describe the young people who immersed themselves in the pages of the periodical; focus on the role of Black heroes and heroines; address The Brownies’ Book in the context of critical literacy theory; and place The Brownies’ Book within the context of Black futurity and justice. Bookending the essays are, reprinted in full, the first and last issues of the magazine. A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies’ Book" illuminates the many ways in which the magazine—simultaneously beautiful, complicated, problematic, and inspiring—remains worthy of attention well into this century.

Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question— Who speaks?— by examining a variety of represented silences. These include children who do not speak, do not yet speak effectively, or speak on behalf of others. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children’s literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children’s literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children’s literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child’s journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child’s verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may act as intermediaries, speaking on behalf of species that cannot. Recently, we have seen children exercise their voices on the world stage and as authors. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account— inside and outside the text. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature addresses this underconceptualized subject in what will be an important text for scholars of children’s literature, childhood studies, English, disability studies, gender studies, race studies, ecopedagogy, and education.

"The Brownies' Book occupies a special place in the history of African American children's literature. Informally the children's counterpart to the NAACP's The Crisis magazine, it was one of the first periodicals created primarily for Black youth. Several of the objectives the creators delineated in 1919 when announcing the arrival of the publication-"To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race" and "To make colored children realize that being 'colored' is a beautiful, normal thing"-still resonate with contemporary creators, readers, and scholars of African American children's literature. The meticulously researched essays in A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" get to the heart of The Brownies' Book "project" using critical approaches both varied and illuminating. Contributors to the volume explore the underappreciated role of Jessie Redmon Fauset in creating The Brownies' Book and in the cultural life of Black America; describe the young people who immersed themselves in the pages of the periodical; focus on the role of Black heroes and heroines; address The Brownies' Book in the context of critical literacy theory; and place The Brownies' Book within the context of Black futurity and justice. Bookending the essays are, reprinted in full, the first and last issues of the magazine. A Centennial Celebration of "The Brownies' Book" illuminates the many ways in which the magazine-simultaneously beautiful, complicated, problematic, and inspiring-remains worthy of attention well into this century"--

Investigates how depictions of young people in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America use artifice to destabilize pre-existing narratives of truth, news, and fact. Cub Reporters considers the intersections between children’s literature and journalism in the United States during the period between the Civil War and World War I. American children’s literature of this time, including works from such writers as L. Frank Baum, Horatio Alger Jr., and Richard Harding Davis, as well as unique journalistic examples including the children’s page of the Chicago Defender, subverts the idea of news. In these works, journalism is not a reporting of fact, but a reporting of artifice, or human-made apparatus—artistic, technological, psychological, cultural, or otherwise. Using a methodology that combines approaches from literary analysis, historicism, cultural studies, media studies, and childhood studies, Paige Gray shows how the cub reporters of children’s literature report the truth of artifice and relish it. They signal an embrace of artifice as a means to access individual agency, and in doing so, both child and adult readers are encouraged to deconstruct and create the world anew. “Cub Reporters adds an exciting new volume to the growing collection of scholarship about American periodical culture and children’s culture alike. Gray lays out her arguments neatly and convincingly, and supports them, throughout. The book is accessible, convincing, and engaging, and is poised to become a touchstone for future academic work.” — Karen Roggenkamp, author of Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth–Century American Newspapers and Fiction

Langston Hughes was one of the most important American writers of his generation, and one of the most versatile, producing poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography. In this innovative study, R. Baxter Miller explores Hughes's life and art to enlarge our appreciation of his contribution to American letters. Arguing that readers often miss the complexity of Hughes's work because of its seeming accessibility, Miller begins with a discussion of the writer's auto-biography, an important yet hitherto neglected key to his imagination. Moving on to consider the subtle resonances of his life in the varied genres over which his imagination "wandered," Miller finds a constant symbiotic bond between the historical and the lyrical. The range of Hughes's artistic vision is revealed in his depiction of Black women, his political stance, his lyric and tragi-comic modes. This is one of the first studies to apply recent methods of literary analysis, including formalist, structuralist, and semiotic criticism, to the work of a Black American writer. Miller not only affirms in Hughes's work the peculiar qualities of Black American culture but provides a unifying conception of his art and identifies the primary metaphors lying at its heart. Here is a fresh and coherent reading of the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest voices, a reinterpretation that renews our appreciation not only of Black American text and heritage but of the literary imagination itself.

Texas has been home to so many colorful characters, out-of-staters might wonder if any normal people live here. And it's true that the "Texian" desire to act out sometimes overcomes even the most sober citizens—which makes it a real challenge for the genuine eccentrics to distinguish themselves from the rest of us. Fortunately, though, many maverick Texans have risen to the test, and in this book, Gene Fowler introduces us to a gallery of Texas eccentrics from the worlds of oil, ranching, real estate, politics, rodeo, metaphysics, showbiz, art, and folklore. Mavericks rounds up dozens of Fowler's favorite Texas characters, folks like the Trinity River prophet Commodore Basil Muse Hatfield; the colorful poet-politician Cyclone Davis Jr.; Big Bend tourist attraction Bobcat Carter; and the dynamic chief executive of the East Texas Oil Field Governor Willie. Fowler persuasively argues that many of these characters should be viewed as folk performance artists who created "happenings" long before the modern art world took up that practice in the 1960s. Other featured mavericks run the demographic gamut from inspirational connoisseurs of the region's native quirkiness to creative con artists and carnival oddities. But, artist or poser, all of the eccentrics in Mavericks completely embody the style and spirit that makes Texas so interesting, entertaining, and culturally unique.