Product Description: This book highlights detection's malleability by analyzing the works of particular groups of authors from specific time periods written in response to other texts. It traces the roles that gender, race and empire have played in American detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's works through the myriad variations upon them published before 1920 to hard-boiled fiction (the origins of which derive in part from turn-of-the-20th-century notions about gender, race and nationality), and it concludes with a discussion of contemporary mystery series with inner-city settings that address black male and female heroism...read more

Product Description: In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations...read more

Product Description: Appropriate both for the general reader and the student, this wide-ranging anthology of mystery stories provides a chronological and thematic survey of early detection fiction. Included are classic texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G...read more

Product Description: Confluences looks at the prospects for and the potential rewards of breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser's study emphasizes the confluences among three major theories that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr...read more

Product Description: Originally serialized in McGirt's Magazine between 1907 and 1909, The Black Sleuth is one of the earliest African American fictional works to depict a black detective and thus a forerunner of novels by writers such as Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Walter Mosely, Barbara Neely, and Valerie Wilson Wesley...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: " Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, ""What is Africa to Me?"" John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism--the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a bright future--to provide a framework for his study...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Unruly Voice explores the literary and journalistic career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, a turn-of-the-century African American writer who was editor in chief of the Colored American Magazine, though it was not acknowledged on the masthead...read more