Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Black writers have fashioned a unique literary culture through autobiography and fiction. Beginning with the language of slave narratives, this book focuses on the Harlem Renaissance and late-twentieth-century writers and polemicists such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Chester Himes. The author then looks at the surge of writing by black women, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Gayl Jones; and examines the modernists -- from Ishmael Reed to Leon Forrest -- and black storytellers, with special emphasis on James Alan MacPherson and Toni Cade Bambara. A readable analysis and survey of contemporary black literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews