Unmaking the Self-Made Man: Fortune and (Fore)Fathers in the Autobiographies of Langston Hughes

被引：0

作者：

Horne, Abigail ^{[1
]}

机构：

[1] Hampden Sydney Coll, English, Hampden Sydney, VA 23943 USA

来源：

LANGSTON HUGHES REVIEW | 2020年 / 26卷 / 02期

关键词：

Langston Hughes; The Big Sea; I Wonder as I Wander; wealth; African American autobiography;

D O I：

10.5325/langhughrevi.26.2.0139

中图分类号：

I3/7 [各国文学];

学科分类号：

摘要：

In Langston Hughes's autobiographies The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), he critiques the American mythos of individual, financial uplift in a meritocratic nation. Instead of illustrating the achievability of rising from poverty to riches, Hughes highlights the near-impossibility of such a rise for black Americans and challenges a conflation between money and virtue. His autobiographies voice the role of luck in wealth-building and describe an American son who values freedom and community over capital. In so doing, Hughes distinguishes his self-formation from forefathers of American autobiography, from his most important patron, and from his own father. Examining Hughes's focus on fortune in The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander reveals a greater challenge to white supremacist and capitalist values than critics of these books have previously acknowledged, and the narrative structures of the autobiographies enact an alternative, horizontal model as a challenge to the idealized American trajectory of a vertical rise.

引用

页码：139 / 159

页数：21

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