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    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World"
    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World"
    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World"
    Ebook48 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535837750
    A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Edward P. Jones's "The Known World" - Gale

      1

      The Known World

      Edward P. Jones

      2003

      Introduction

      The Known World, published in 2003. Beginning with the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black slave master, Jones's novel explores a fictional county in antebellum Virginia over several decades. With its community-narrative approach and its patchwork storytelling style, the work gets to the heart of the moral dilemma that surrounds the institution of slavery. Jones delves into fundamental questions of human ownership and power over others while exploring views on justice, religion, and morality in the antebellum South.

      The Known World carries an aura of historical accuracy and gravity even though it is entirely fictional. The novel's frequent allusions to the twentieth-century descendents of its characters and its fabricated references to twentieth-century historical scholarship suggest that Jones is also interested in how slaveholding bears on contemporary life. Jones's other work focuses on blacks living in late-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and The Known World enters a fictional chapter of black history which is not necessarily so distant from the frequently desperate conditions that many blacks face in urban U.S. society.

      Despite Faulkner's roots in the South, he readily condemns many aspects of its history and heritage in Absalom, Absalom!. He reveals the unsavory side of southern morals and ethics, including slavery. The novel explores the relationship between modern humanity and the past, examining how past events affect modern decisions and to what extent modern people are responsible for the past.

      Author Biography

      Edward P. Jones was born in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1950, and raised by his single mother, to whom Jones dedicated his first two books. He grew up well aware of the widespread poverty and desperation in the U.S. capital, particularly among African Americans, and this problem was a frequent subject of his writing in the 1990s and early 2000s. Jones himself was homeless for a period in the 1970s, and he struggled with depression. He did well at school and earned a scholarship to Holy Cross College, and he took care of his mother when she became ill and died in 1975.

      Jones went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Virginia, where he studied with authors James McPherson, John Casey, and Peter Taylor. He held a variety of jobs, including summarizing business articles, working as an assistant at Science Magazine, and teaching writing at universities, including Princeton and Georgetown. For most of his life, he has resided in or near Washington, D.C., and for twenty years preceding the publication of The Known World (2003), he lived in the same flat in Arlington, Virginia.

      Jones's first book, a collection of short stories entitled Lost in the City, was published in 1992 to critical acclaim; it won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and received a nomination for the National Book Award. The stories vividly portray African Americans coping with confusion and

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