"The volume's first section demonstrates the subtle influence of the Great Depression's devastation on Black literary themes and methodologies by situating more well-known figures within a wide matrix of lesser known writers, thinkers, and cultural workers. In this way, the volume's opening chapters expand our grasp of the literary tradition by foregrounding the manifestation of economic anxieties in the career trajectories of numerous Black writers as well as the subject matter and conventions employed in their various works. Sharon L. Jones proposes in her introductory chapter that we might trace writers' preoccupations with excess and deprivation as emerging as staple tropes of Depression-era writing"--

This book illustrates African American writers' cultural production and political engagement despite the economic precarity of the 1930s.

The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.

American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 gathers together in a single volume preeminent critics and historians to offer an authoritative, analytic, and theoretically advanced account of the Depression era's key literary events. Many topics of canonical importance, such as protest literature, Hollywood fiction, the culture industry, and populism, receive fresh treatment. The book also covers emerging areas of interest, such as radio drama, bestsellers, religious fiction, internationalism, and middlebrow domestic fiction. Traditionally, scholars have treated each one of these issues in isolation. This volume situates all the significant literary developments of the 1930s within a single and capacious vision that discloses their hidden structural relations - their contradictions, similarities, and reciprocities. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate, graduate students, and scholars interested in American literary culture of the 1930s.

A major new history of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States.

African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

This 2007 Companion is a comprehensive guide to the key authors and works of the African American literary movement.