A Companion to African American Literature

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 viii Introduction 1 Gene Andrew Jarrett Part I. The Literatures of Africa, Middle Passage, Slavery, and Freedom: The Early and Antebellum Periods, c.1750–1865 9 1. Back to the Future: Eighteenth–Century Transatlantic Black Authors 11 Vincent Carretta 2. Africa in Early African American Literature 25 James Sidbury 3. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature 45 Frances Smith Foster and Kim D. Green 4. The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African American Literature 59 Michael J. Drexler and Ed White 5. Religion in Early African American Literature 75 Joanna Brooks and Tyler Mabry 6. The Economies of the Slave Narrative 90 Philip Gould 7. The 1850s: The First Renaissance of Black Letters 103 Maurice S. Lee 8. African American Literary Nationalism 119 Robert S. Levine 9. Periodicals, Print Culture, and African American Poetry 133 Ivy G. Wilson Part II. New Negro Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics: The Modern Period, 1865–c.1940 149 10. Racial Uplift and the Literature of the New Negro 151 Marlon B. Ross 11. The Dialect of New Negro Literature 169 Gene Andrew Jarrett 12. African American Literary Realism, 1865–1914 185 Andreá N. Williams 13. Folklore and African American Literature in the Post–Reconstruction Era 200 Shirley Moody–Turner 14. The Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro at Home and Abroad 212 Michelle Ann Stephens 15. Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture in African American Literature 227 Cherene Sherrard–Johnson 16. Aesthetic Hygiene: Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Work of Art 243 Mark Christian Thompson 17. African American Modernism and State Surveillance 254 William J. Maxwell Part III. Reforming the Canon, Tradition, and Criticism of African American Literature: The Contemporary Period, c.1940–Present 269 18. The Chicago Renaissance 271 Michelle Yvonne Gordon 19. Jazz and African American Literature 286 Keith D. Leonard 20. The Black Arts Movement 302 James Edward Smethurst 21. Humor in African American Literature 315 Glenda R. Carpio 22. Neo–Slave Narratives 332 Madhu Dubey 23. Popular Black Women’s Fiction and the Novels of Terry McMillan 347 Robin V. Smiles 24. African American Science Fiction 360 Jeffrey Allen Tucker 25. Latino/a Literature and the African Diaspora 376 Theresa Delgadillo 26. African American Literature and Queer Studies: The Conundrum of James Baldwin 393 Guy Mark Foster 27. African American Literature and Psychoanalysis 410 Arlene R. Keizer Name Index 421 Subject Index 442

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).

“Presenting a comprehensive overview of the field from the th cen–tury to the present, A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Wiley–Blackwell), provides readers with a fairly comprehensive overview of one of America’s richest literary traditions.”  ( American Literary Scholarship , 2012) "This book does, indeed, present a challenge to traditional African American studies, and will be a valuable resource for libraries catering for US literary, cultural and historical studies." ( Reference Reviews , February 2011)