Resistance In African American Literature Of The Forward - In The 1940s To The 1960s

African American Literature, Jewish American Literature and Southern Literature make American Literature more various and more colorful. In the process of its development, African American Literature formed its own literary tradition, concepts, character and context, which make it a very important and particular part of American Literature. Because of one by one works, African American Literature is becoming the centre of the literature. From 1940s to 1960s, African American Literature played an important role in inheriting and inspiriting, studying it can help us not only to understand the detail of the literature, but also the development of African American Literature.From 1940s to 1960s, African American Literature developed rapidly, on the one hand, the theme was various and deep, which contained race issues, the relationship between race and literature, on the other hand, the writing technique became more multiple and modernistic. In this period, many authors wrote lots of excellent works which had reached a high level, the most two famous novels were Native Son and Invisible Man. Richard Wright created a different hero in Native Son, he has a great fear when facing white man,but he is so brave to fight against other people with his wisdom. Because of the special character, Bigger is a real black people. Ralph Ellison portrayed the new life of the black in Invisible Man, and pointed out that if one person no matter white or black lost himself, he would finally become an "invisible man".From the two works, we can see the character of African American Literature from 1940s to 1960s. First, the discussion on race issues is more profound, not only focused on the social system, but also black people's dilemma in the contemporary society. Second, African American Literature in this period paid much attention on the unique cultural tradition of black people. The authors found their own cultural elements, such as black slang, black music and black humor, and replied them into the works. This made the African American Literature more distinct. Last, the means of artistic expression was various. Besides realism technique, the authors used other ones, for example symbolism, psychological depiction, subconsciosness and so on. They put these skills and traditional elements together, and created large numbers of outstanding works.