TY - BOOK AU - Baker,Houston A. TI - Blues, ideology, and Afro-American literature: a vernacular theory SN - 0226035360 AV - PS153.B167.B584 1984 PY - 1984/// CY - Chicago PB - University of Chicago Press KW - American literature KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism KW - Blues (Music) KW - African Americans KW - Intellectual life KW - African Americans in literature KW - Blues (Music) in literature KW - Music and literature KW - Blues Songs, etc KW - United States KW - English literature KW - American negro writers, to 1979 - Critical studies N1 - 2; Figurations for a New American Literary history: archaeology, ideology, and Afro-American discourse.--; Discovering America: generational shifts, Afro-American literary criticism, and the study of expressive culture.--; A Dream of American form: fictive discourse, Black (w)holes, and a Blues book most excellent N2 - Relating the blues to American social and literary history and Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. With extensive reference to economic and historical facts and to the contributions of symbolic anthropology, Marxist criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction, he discusses, among others, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. In these exemplary analyses, Baker shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it. -- From publisher's description ER -