Product Description: John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience...read more

Product Description: Langston Hughes has been an inspiration to generations of readers and writers seeking a passionate, intelligent, and socially responsible art. In this volume, Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics to produce an interdisciplinary approach to the important historical and cultural elements reflected in Hughes's work...read more

Product Description: Ralph Ellison has been a controversial figure, both lionized and vilified, since he seemed to burst onto the national literary scene in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man. In this volume Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics who look not only at Ellison's seminal novel but also at the fiction and nonfiction work that both preceded and followed it, focusing on important historical and cultural influences that help contextualize Ellison's thematic concerns and artistic aesthetic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is a multidisciplinary exploration of the ways that African American “hot” music—minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz, and especially blues—emerged into the American cultural mainstream in the nineteenth century and ultimately dominated both American music and literature from 1920 to 1929...read more

Product Description: "Drawing on a deep understanding of the shades and structures of the blues, Steven C. Tracy elucidates the vital relationship between this musical form and the art of Langston Hughes, preeminent poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Tracy provides a cultural context for the poet's work and shows how Hughes mined African-American oral and literary traditions to create his blues-inspired poetry...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Black Ulysses Trilogy presents a compendium of African American folklore collected by pioneer sociologist/folklorist Howard W. Odum. The trilogy collects stories, songs, and folktales, which Odum uses to weave the narrative of his chief informant John Wesley Gordon (Black Ulysses) as he travels the country, fights in World War I, and returns to the South...read more

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Product Description: Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the 1960s...read more