San Antonio College Library

Argues that Black literature cannot be characterized strictly as social realism, and offers a textual analysis of works by eighteenth- to twentieth-century Black writers.

"With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history."--Jacket.

"Often considered alienated from mainstream culture and consigned to negative environments, Afro-American writers have created alternative spatial and geographical metaphors to develop a positive sense of individual and cultural identity. Melvin Dixon demonstrates how three principal figures of the land--the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop--have become places of refuge and cultural revitalization for the performance of identity, from...

First published in 1974, From the Dark Tower is a survey of twenty-eight major black writers and their works from 1900 to 1960. Literary, biographical, and historical synopses of these writers are skillfully interwoven with critical analyses in a style accessible to students, scholars, and general readers. This volume is different from most books of criticism in that it is written from the perspective of a scholar who knew and observed most of the...

Examining an important and often overlooked aspect of most black writers' literary ancestry -- their southernness, Payne argues that characteristically southern themes and narrative forms occur in the novels of Chesnutt, Johnson, Toomer, Wright and Ellison. They contain not just exclusively Afro-American narrative influences but also southern elements visible in the works of Wolfe, Faulkner and O'Connor.