Book Cover Image of A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference by Jeffrey Allen Tucker

A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference
by Jeffrey Allen Tucker

    Publication Date: Jul 26, 2004
    List Price: $27.95
    Format: Paperback, 344 pages
    Classification: Nonfiction
    ISBN13: 9780819566898
    Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
    Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
    Parent Company: Wesleyan University

    Description of A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference by Jeffrey Allen Tucker


    Samuel R. Delany is one of today’s most interesting writers. African-American and gay, Delany crosses boundaries—generic (science fiction, memoir, theory, pornography) and academic (literary studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies). Critics both black and white have read Delany as a writer who downplays his racial identity in order to aspire to universal values. In contrast, A Sense of Wonder shows how Delany’s works participate in African-American cultural traditions.

    The book begins with an analysis of Delany’s Dhalgren, using the novel’s links to black cultural traditions as the key to unlocking its puzzling content. Jeffrey Allen Tucker’s reading of the four-volume Return to Nev rÿon series places Delany’s explorations of semiotics in dialogue with Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and social histories on slavery in America. From there, Tucker moves to Delany’s groundbreaking autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, his experimental novella Atlantis: Model, 1925, and to his pornographic novel, The Mad Man. Tucker’s aim is to advance a reading of identity that acknowledges its multiplicity and permeability without emptying it of socio-political efficacy and meaning.




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