Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies

This volume celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture. Over the last decade and more, American literary studies have tended, with only a few rare and recent exceptions, to look at separate strands of literary history and tradition--African American or white, male or female, lesbian or gay or straight. Every contributor to this collection, no matter how widely varied the point of view in other ways, examines the dynamic relationship between "mainstream" and African-American expressive traditions in American culture. Engaging the work of writers from Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass to William Styron and Ernest Gaines, they concur in treating the color line as a site of cultural mutation where American identities are produced, not diluted, through acts of cultural exchange. The book draws new research into the rich, contentious, yet thoroughly pluralistic cultural equation that is American literature. Toni Morrison's ground-breaking lecture, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" opens the book, which then moves on to provocative essays by scholars who have heeded her call for a rethinking of American literary tradition, black and white.

Henry B. Wonham is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Art of the Tale and Charles W. Chesnutt, A Study of the Short Fiction and editor of Criticism and the Color Line.

Vogel is the director of American Studies and a visiting assistant professor of English and American Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and director of American studies at Stanford University. She is also the award-winning author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and over one hundred articles, essays, columns, and reviews. She holds a Ph.D in American Studies from Yale University and is a former president of the American Studies Association.

Robert Levine is a classical music and opera critic and senior editor at www.classicstoday.com. He is the author of "Maria Callas: A Musical Biography" and the children's book "The Story of the Orchestra", among others.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is professor in the African American Studies Program and the English Department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He is author of "Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form".

Jeffrey Steele is Associate Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on second and third language acquisition as well as language assessment.