Gene Andrew Jarrett 
A Companion to African American Literature 

Through a series of essays that explore the forms, themes, genres,
historical contexts, major authors, and latest critical approaches,
A Companion to African American Literature presents a
comprehensive chronological overview of African American literature
from the eighteenth century to the modern day

* Examines African American literature from its earliest origins,
through the rise of antislavery literature in the decades leading
into the Civil War, to the modern development of contemporary
African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political
ideologies

* Addresses the latest critical and scholarly approaches to
African American literature

* Features essays by leading established literary scholars as
well as newer voices

Table of Content

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
Mc Millan 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

About the author

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Professor and Chair of the
Department of English at Boston University. He is the author
of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African
American Literature (2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and
Realism in African American Literature (2007), and the editor
or co-editor of several volumes and collections of African American
literature and literary criticism.