Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Origins of the Dream : Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric, Hardback Book

Origins of the Dream : Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric Hardback

Hardback

Item not Available

Description

Since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King’s “dream” was connected to Langston Hughes’s poetry.

Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W.

Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes’s influence on King’s rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech. King’s staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance—who had his own reputation as a communist—would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist.

Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King’s orations.

In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes’s revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King’s voice.

He contends that by employing Hughes’s metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet’s subversive voice.

By separating Hughes’s identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.

Information

Other Formats

£37.50

Item not Available
Item not Available
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information