© Columbia University Press
Burnin' Down the House: Home in African American Literature
Paper, 160 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13441-5
$28.50
/ £17.00
February, 2005
Cloth, 160 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13440-8
$80.50
/ £47.50
"This is fertile and exciting theoretical ground... We'll hear from Prince again, and will be dazzled and provoked." — Adam Gussow, Southern Register
"Sweeney Prince's book is in itself an example of the blues expressiveness that she argues is the only potentially fruitful foundation upon which to build any kind of Home for African Americans and their literature." — Dianne Johnson, University of South Carolina
"One of the most original examinations of the social and psychological dimensions of the modern African American novel since Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Who Set You Flowin? By building on and sharply revising Houston Baker’s interpretation of the blues in African American literature, Valerie Sweeney Prince explores the constant longing for home expressed in the blues—a longing that resists idealization and confronts head-on the instability and potential destruction of Home. Finely textured and beautifully written, this book powerfully captures the multi-layered and polysemic meanings of Home for a people virtually rendered homeless by a history of slavery, Jim Crow, displacement and migration." — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination