A Companion to African American Literature »

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Associate Professor of English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes and collections, including The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (2009).

A Companion to African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the field from the eighteenth century to the present day. Embracing the full range of African American literature, essays explore forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, and major authors, and present the latest critical approaches. Featuring contributions from both established and rising scholars, whose in-depth essays cover the Black Atlantic and the New World literatures of the African Diaspora in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the rise of antislavery literature and the African American novel in the decades leading into the Civil War, the evolution of African American literary genres and political thought between the Civil War and World War One, the modern development of African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political ideologies between the World Wars, and the literary and methodological complexities of contemporary African American literature, A Companion to African American Literature offers invaluable insights for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of one of America’s richest and most complex literary traditions.

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction (Gene Andrew Jarrett, Boston University).

Part I: The Literatures of Africa, Middle Passage, Slavery, and Freedom: The Early and Antebellum Periods, c.1750–1865.

1. Back to the Future: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Black Authors (Vincent Carretta, University of Maryland).

2. Africa in Early African American Literature (James Sidbury, University of Texas at Austin).

3. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature (Frances Smith Foster, Emory University; Kim D. Green, Emory University) .

4. The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African American Literature (Michael J. Drexler, Bucknell University; Ed White, University of Florida).

5. Religion in Early African American Literature (Joanna Brooks, San Diego State University; Tyler Mabry, University of Texas at Austin).

6. The Economies of the Slave Narrative (Philip Gould, Brown University).

7. The 1850s: The First Renaissance of Black Letters (Maurice S. Lee, Boston University).

8. African American Literary Nationalism (Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland).

9. Periodicals, Print Culture, and African American Poetry (Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University).

Part II: New Negro Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics: The Modern Period, 1865–c.1940.

10. Racial Uplift and the Literature of the New Negro (Marlon B. Ross, University of Virginia).

11. Racial Uplift and the Dialect of New Negro Literature (Gene Andrew Jarrett, Boston University).

12. African American Literary Realism, 1865–1914 (Andreá N. Williams, Ohio State University).

13. Folklore and African American Literature in the Post-Reconstruction Era (Shirley Moody Turner, Penn State University).

14. The Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro at Home and Abroad (Michelle Ann Stephens, Colgate University).

15. Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture in African American Literature (Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, University of Wisconsin–Madison).

16. Aesthetic Hygiene: Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Work of Art (Mark Christian Thompson, Johns Hopkins University).

17. African American Modernism and State Surveillance (William J. Maxwell, Washington University, St Louis).

Part III: Reforming the Canon, Tradition, and Criticism of African American Literature: The Contemporary Period, c.1940–Present.

18. The Chicago Renaissance (Michelle Yvonne Gordon, University of Southern California–Los Angeles).

19. Jazz and African American Literature (Keith D. Leonard, American University, Washington DC).

20. The Black Arts Movement (James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst).

21. Humor in African American Literature (Glenda R. Carpio, Harvard University).

22. Neo-Slave Narratives (Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois–Chicago).

23. Popular Black Women’s Fiction and the Novels of Terry McMillan (Robin V. Smiles, University of Maryland).

24. African American Science Fiction (Jeffrey Allen Tucker, University of Rochester).

25. Latino/a Literature and the African Diaspora (Theresa Delgadillo, Ohio State University).

26. African American Literature and Queer Studies: The Conundrum of James Baldwin (Guy Mark Foster, Bowdoin College).

27. African American Literature and Psychoanalysis (Arlene R. Keizer, University of California–Irvine).

Index.