The
Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. The first volume explores literature up to 1920 and the second, literature since 1920. The contents result from extensive research on the needs of students and instructors, the cutting-edge developments in scholarship, and the expert guidance of Gene Andrew Jarrett and the diverse and distinguished advisory editors. As a result, the anthology organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements.
Volume 1 showcases the special literatures of Africa, the Middle Passage, and slavery in the early national period; of slavery and freedom in the antebellum and Civil War periods; and of Reconstruction and racial uplift in the New Negro period. Volume 2 exhibits the remarkable literatures of the New Negro Renaissance in the modern period; of modernism, modernity, and civil rights; of nationalism, militancy, and the Black Aesthetic; and, finally, of the contemporary period.
With the inclusion of extensive pedagogical features, including a preface, volume and period introductions, author headnotes, selected scholarly bibliographies, and textual annotations, the anthology is strategically designed to support students and instructors, and address the latest critical and scholarly approaches to African American literature.
