This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

This book provides the richest study available of African American literature during the years immediately following the Civil War.

About the Author
Eric Gardner is award-winning author of Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) and Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015) and editor of rediscovered works by several nineteenth-century African American writers. He teaches at Saginaw Valley State University.


Book Information
ISBN 9781108427470
Author Eric Gardner
Format Hardback
Page Count 330
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 610g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 161mm * 24mm