Modern Greece, constructed by the early nineteenth-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been "haunted, holy ground" in English and American literature for almost two centuries. In Byron's Shadow analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of "Greece" to suit changing eras.

This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the iconic and beloved Langston Hughes. It offers a life in letters that showcases his many struggles as well as his memorable achievements. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes’s journey in all its aspects: personal, political, practical, and—above all—literary. His letters range from those written to family members, notably his father (who opposed Langston’s literary am...

A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writerSince its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, wr...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help art...

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and so...

RM Johnson's extraordinary novel is a stirring family portrait that resonates with emotion and wit, as a father faces death—and the three sons he abandoned so many years before.“Mr. Harris, I'm sorry, but you have cancer.” Although devastated to learn he has just one year to live, fifty-five-year-old Julius Harris has always known that the day would come when he would pay for walking out on his wife and three children twenty years earlier. Now, with a sudden and pa...

For Ishmael Reed, Barack Obama, like Michelangelo’s St. Anthony, is a tormented man, haunted by modern reincarnations of the demonic spirits used to break slaves. These were the “Nigger Breakers”—men like Edward Covey, who was handed the job of breaking Frederick Douglass. “Isn’t it ironic,” writes Reed: “A media that scolded the Jim Crow South in the 1960s now finds itself hosting the bird.” In this collection, which includes several unpublished essays, Ishmael Reed brings to bear his gra...

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium.Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of Africa...

As a young South African woman of about twenty, Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” was brought to London and placed on exhibit in 1810. Clad in the Victorian equivalent of a body stocking, and paraded through the streets and on stage in a cage she became a human spectacle in London and Paris. Baartman’s distinctive physique became the object of ridicule, curiosity, scientific inquiry, and desire until and after her premature death. The figure of Sarah Baartman was reduced ...

Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo -- hear what a jury of prominent African Americans has to say about the black man's struggle for justice in AmericaPrompted by the killing of Amadou Diallo and the acquittal of the four New York City police officers who mistook him for an armed criminal, this collection of essays by prominent black male writers offers twelve unique and startling perspectives on what it's like for a black man living in an inherently racist society.

How FBI surveillance influenced African American writingFew institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, pl...