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.