A treasury of hard-to-find stories, essays, tributes, and humor from a literary master

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The horrific 1955 slaying of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till marks a significant turning point in the history of American race relations. An African American boy from Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was accused of "wolf-whistling" at a young white woman. His murderers abducted him from his great-uncle's home, beat him, then shot him in the head. Three days later, searchers discovered his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two white men charged with his murder received a swift acquittal from an all-white jury. The eleven essays in Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination examine how the narrative of the Till lynching continues to haunt racial consciousness and to resonate in our collective imagination.The trial and acquittal of Till's murderers became, in the words of one historian, "the first great media event of the civil rights movement," and since then, the lynching has assumed a central place in literary memory. The international group of contributors to this volume explores how the Emmett Till story has been fashioned and refashioned in fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography by writers as diverse as William Bradford Huie, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Anne Moody, Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Lewis Nordan. They suggest the presence of an "Emmett Till narrative" deeply embedded in post-1955 literature, an overarching recurrent plot that builds on recognizable elements and is as legible as the "lynching narrative" or the "passing narrative." Writers have fashioned Till's story in many ways: an the annotated bibliography that ends the volume discusses more than 130 works that memorialize the lynching, calling attention to the full extent of Till's presence in literary memory. Breaking new ground in civil rights studies and the discussion of race in America, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination eloquently attests to the special power and artistic resonance of one young man's murder.

"These sermons were prepared from 1920 to 1924. Professor Barth preached some of them while he was minister of the Reformed congregation in Safenwil, Canton Aargau, Switzerland; others in the Reformed Church in Goettingen while he was professor of theology in the University. Pastor Thurneysen at that time preached to the congregation in Bruggen, near St. Gall, Switzerland. The sermons were written not for special occasions but for the regular Sunday morning service, and were addressed to such men and women as one will find in any village or city church--to men and women in the struggle for life, waiting and seeking for God. "Pastor Thurneysen selected the sermons and arranged them according to a scheme that may be indicated by the words Promise, Christ, Christian Living." --from the Translator's Preface

Whether situated in churches or circulating in more flexible, mobile works - manuscript or printed texts, jewels or rosaries, personal bequests or antique 'rarities' - monuments were ubiquitous in post-Reformation England. In this period of religious change, the unsettled meanings of sacred sites and artifacts encouraged a new conception of remembrance and, with it, changed relationships between devotional and secular writings, arts, and identities. Beginning in the parish church, Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton moves beyond that space to see remembrance as shaping dynamic systems within which early modern men and women experienced loss and recollection. Removing monuments from parochial or antiquarian concerns, this study re-imagines them as pervasively involved with other commemorative works, not least the writings of our most canonical authors. These far-reaching, flexible chapters combine three critical strands - religion, materiality, and gender - to describe the arts of remembrance as material and textual remains of living webs of connection in which creators and creations are mutually involved.