Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history, Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of how the history of race has been represented and written about, it shows in what ways those representations and writings have influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume how and why race has been so central to American literature as a whole.

The book shows how American racial history and culture have shaped, and been shaped in turn by, American literature.

About the Author
John Ernest is the author of over 45 essays and author or editor of twelve books, including Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (2004), Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014).


Book Information
ISBN 9781108487399
Author John Ernest
Format Hardback
Page Count 466
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 800g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 158mm * 30mm