Sample literature review section

Sample literature review section: (Red for introducing the topic of each paragraph; Yellow highlights for developmental evidences/quotes)

According to the statistics by Brett Hoover, up to 1992, there are 30 commentary articles about Go Tell it On the Mountains. Among them, over eighty percent are published in the middle of 20th century. The interest began with the publication of the first bibliography about James Baldwin’s life in 1956: James Baldwin, Novelist of the New Age, which introduced Baldwin’s life and works in details. George Hutchinson published another bibliography in 1965 entitled In Search of James Baldwin: A Bibliography of the Color Line.

Besides these bibliographies, scholarly studies contain race identity and the concern with the black s’ living conditions.In 1978, Elaine K. Ginsberg published Go Tell it On the Mountains and the Fictions of Identity, which raised questions about identity categories and boundaries between races. Similarly, in Sachi Owasuki’s article “Mixed-Race Identity Politics in James Baldwin,”he points out that “the hybrid space that Baldwin…opens in his text disrupts the essentialist notion of identity by questioning the boundaries of race and ethnicity from within” (20). Martha Carter interprets Baldwin’s work in “The Narrative and Textual Strategy in Baldwin’s Works,” saying……

In 1987, Spanish Scholar Mar Gallego published James Baldwin’s Identity Politics and Textual Strategies, offering an intelligent analysis of the significance of Baldwin’s works. Gallego explains that the richness and insight of Baldwin’s racial theme uncovers the inhuman treatment of blacks in an age when the standard of value judgment had been marred deeply by the white superiority complex…..

There is also a group of study on artistic achievement of Baldwin’s works. For instance, Deborah McDowell, in his “The ‘Nameless, Shameful Impulse’: Sexuality in Baldwin’s Later Works,” speaks highly of the literary contribution Baldwin has done by comparing him to his contemporary writer Fauset. McDowell notes that “Baldwin demonstrates a poised facility with writing, a knowledge and mastery of the element of fiction, especially narrative economy, effective language, focused characterization, unity, point-of-view, not always evident in Fauset’s novels”(79). The International Forum on African American Writers remarks that his writing is “a tantalizing mix of moral fable and crystal-clear narrative, exploring black man’s sexuality and racial solidarity”(quoted in Wall, 131)…..

With regard to the research of Go Tell it on the Mountains,academic works mainly involve the discussion about the racial awareness of the blacks.For example, in “Clara’s ‘True Colors’”, Jennifer Brody debates about the value of identity, claiming that the sense of the racial belongingness is “cultivated” by the class that holds power in ideological realm (185). Baldwin’s Fading Subject written by Nell Sullivan reveals to us t hat initiative on the part of blacks means not just the overstepping of a racial boundary, but very often death and disappearance. When the hero dies in the book, “Clara jumps and Irene pushes her. Bellow’s remark ‘so you are a nigger, a damned dirty nigger’inaugurates Clara’s disappearance from the window. In the Lacanian version..., the subject disappears behind the signifier in dialogue with the Other, always while trying to determine the desire of the Other” (Sullivan 280).