John Ernest
Biographic Data
| ID | 995656 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Ernest |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Ernest |
| SIGNATURE | ERNEST J |
| AFFILIATIONS | West Virginia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Portrait You Can’t See: Thomas Onward
Through an analysis of the imagined portrait of Thomas Onward in William J. Wilson’s 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” John Ernest argues that Thomas Onward operates as a purposeful antiportrait that challenges dominant nineteenth-century visual conventions for depicting African Americans. As Ernest demonstrates, Wilson—writing as “Ethiop”—constructs Thomas in opposition to the proliferating “Toms” of American culture, including the sentimen…
Whiteness and American Literature
This volume provides an illuminating exploration of how ideas about whiteness have shaped the literature and culture of the United States. Covering nearly 250 years – from the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited access to citizenship to immigrants who were 'free white person[s],' to the present – Whiteness and American Literature considers how a broad spectrum of novels, movies, short stories, television shows, poems, songs, and other works de…
The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature
Race is central to American history. It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding how race has been defined and deployed at every stage of the nation's history. Offering a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history of race, The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature shows how this history has been represented in literature, and how those representations have influenced American culture. Written…
Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée
Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as…
Race in American Literature and Culture
The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature
The tragic constant of American culture has been the need for African Americans to establish even their fundamental humanity, let alone their right to equal treatment under the law or to political representation in the Republic. The African American cause was once represented by the question, “Am I not a man and a brother?”; it was later represented by the assertion “I am a man!”; and today the movement is defined by the strangely controversial s…
To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other a…
The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative
The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative approaches the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritizing the broad tradition over individual authors; by representing interdisciplinary approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like ecocritical readings of sl…
Slave Narratives and Historical Memory
The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851
The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851." Slavery & Abolition, 33(4), pp. 626–627
Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
Journal Article Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage Get access Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. By Vincent Carretta. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xvi, 279 pp. $29.95.) John Ernest John Ernest West Virginia UniversityMorgantown, West Virginia [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 2, September 20…
The Cambridge History of African American Literature
The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States. Expert contributors, drawn from the United States and beyond, emphasise the dual nature of each text discussed as a work of art created by an individual and as a response to unfolding…
Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories
African American history is often a challenging subject, involving scholars in search of traces of voices or of an African American presence, individual or collective, in the shadows of archives devoted to the world of white Americans. At times, the response to such challenges has been an approach to history designed to serve the needs of a Black History Month presentation, the story of heroic individuals struggling against the odds. Especially o…
Canals and Rivers
Canals and Rivers John Ernest (bio) Ken and I have found ourselves together on, I think, at least three occasions so far to discuss this topic, and I think the expectation has usually been that we are on different sides of some kind of fence—on his, he’s presenting a clear argument about a body of literature obstructed by outdated ideological baggage, and I’m operating chaotically at the baggage claim office, arguing that the powers that be have …
Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and "Syncre-Nationalism" in the Nineteenth-Century North (review)
I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
Book Review| June 01 2009 I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era John Ernest John Ernest Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2009) 81 (2): 412–413. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Ernest; I Don't Hate …
Outside the Box: Henry Box Brown and the Politics of Antislavery Agency
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory - Volume 63, Number 4, Winter 2007
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Special attention is paid to leading exponen…
The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Research Article| September 01 2006 The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth John Ernest John Ernest Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 459–486. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Ernest; The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the N…
Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861
White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater; Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American I…
Book Review| June 01 2005 White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater; Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities; The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study By Marvin McAllister. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2003. x,239 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.By S. E. Wilmer. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2002. vii,…
Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. John Ernest. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. xv + 272 pages. $17.95. Get access Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. John Ernest. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. xv + 272 pages. $17.95. Anne Fleischmann Anne Fleischmann University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: Oxfor…
Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity
The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have historically been reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Robert S. Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the other's political vi…
From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy
Slave Narratives and Historical Memory
The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Research Article| September 01 2006 The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth John Ernest John Ernest Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 459–486. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Ernest; The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the N…
Henry Adams's Double: Recreating the Philosophical Statesman
A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader
From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy
Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams
Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays
Harriet Jacobs, today perhaps the single-most read and studied black American woman of the nineteenth century, has not until recently enjoyed sustained, scholarly analysis. This anthology presents a far-ranging compendium of literary and cultural scholarship which will take its place as the primary resource for students and teachers of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The contributors include both established Jacobs scholars such as Jean Fa…
Every Tub Must Sit on its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper
The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown's The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom
Focusing on William Wells Brown's one published play. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), I address Brown's decision to supplement his antislavery lectures with dramatic readings of original plays. In this effort to challenge the terms of a representative identity as a black antislavery lecturer, Brown presented a conception of social life grounded in what I term multiply contingent identity. By this formulation, one's social identity is a…
Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. John Ernest. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. xv + 272 pages. $17.95. Get access Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. John Ernest. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. xv + 272 pages. $17.95. Anne Fleischmann Anne Fleischmann University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: Oxfor…
Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity
The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have historically been reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Robert S. Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the other's political vi…
Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance
Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861
White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater; Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American I…
Book Review| June 01 2005 White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater; Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities; The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study By Marvin McAllister. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2003. x,239 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.By S. E. Wilmer. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2002. vii,…
The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Research Article| September 01 2006 The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth John Ernest John Ernest Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 459–486. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Ernest; The Floating Icon and the Fluid Text: Rereading the N…
Outside the Box: Henry Box Brown and the Politics of Antislavery Agency
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory - Volume 63, Number 4, Winter 2007
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
The slave narrative has become a crucial genre within African American literary studies and an invaluable record of the experience and history of slavery in the United States. This Companion examines the slave narrative's relation to British and American abolitionism, Anglo-American literary traditions such as autobiography and sentimental literature, and the larger African American literary tradition. Special attention is paid to leading exponen…
Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and "Syncre-Nationalism" in the Nineteenth-Century North (review)
I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era
Book Review| June 01 2009 I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era John Ernest John Ernest Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2009) 81 (2): 412–413. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Ernest; I Don't Hate …
The Cambridge History of African American Literature
The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States. Expert contributors, drawn from the United States and beyond, emphasise the dual nature of each text discussed as a work of art created by an individual and as a response to unfolding…
Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories
African American history is often a challenging subject, involving scholars in search of traces of voices or of an African American presence, individual or collective, in the shadows of archives devoted to the world of white Americans. At times, the response to such challenges has been an approach to history designed to serve the needs of a Black History Month presentation, the story of heroic individuals struggling against the odds. Especially o…
Canals and Rivers
Canals and Rivers John Ernest (bio) Ken and I have found ourselves together on, I think, at least three occasions so far to discuss this topic, and I think the expectation has usually been that we are on different sides of some kind of fence—on his, he’s presenting a clear argument about a body of literature obstructed by outdated ideological baggage, and I’m operating chaotically at the baggage claim office, arguing that the powers that be have …
The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851
The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851." Slavery & Abolition, 33(4), pp. 626–627
Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
Journal Article Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage Get access Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. By Vincent Carretta. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xvi, 279 pp. $29.95.) John Ernest John Ernest West Virginia UniversityMorgantown, West Virginia [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 2, September 20…
Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other a…
History (26 works) · Art (23 works) · Race, History, and American Society (20 works) · Art history (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Literature (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)