The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the key literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present, and provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in women s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as:

• The origins of American women s writing
• The colonial period and the Puritans
• The early national period and the rhetoric of independence
• The 19th Century and the Civil War period
• The 20th Century, including Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
• The 21st Century and the future of American women s writing
• Feminism, sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism.

The volume examines the ways in which both canonical and lesser known women writers from diverse class and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, and giving particular attention to the ways writers worked both inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create a space for women's voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. This valuable introduction offers a readable, cohesive narrative of the development of literature by American women and a refreshing range of perspectives. It also includes bullet point summaries and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, making it particularly useful for students."

The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature considers the key literary, political, historical and intellectual contexts of African American literature from its origins to the present, and also provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in African American literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as: Vernacular, Oral, and Blues Traditions in Literature Slave Narratives and Their Influence The Harlem Renaissance Mid-twentieth century black American Literature Literature of the civil rights and Black Power era Contemporary African American Writing Key thematic and theoretical debates within the field Examining the relationship between the literature and its historical and sociopolitical contexts, D. Quentin Miller covers key authors and works as well as less canonical writers and themes, including literature and music, female authors, intersectionality and transnational black writing.

The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature considers the key literary, political, historical and intellectual contexts of African American literature from its origins to the present, and also provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in African American literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as: Vernacular, Oral, and Blues Traditions in Literature Slave Narratives and Their Influence The Harlem Renaissance Mid-twentieth century black American Literature Literature of the civil rights and Black Power era Contemporary African American Writing Key thematic and theoretical debates within the field Examining the relationship between the literature and its historical and sociopolitical contexts, D. Quentin Miller covers key authors and works as well as less canonical writers and themes, including literature and music, female authors, intersectionality and transnational black writing.

African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the key literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present, and provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in women s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as:

• The origins of American women s writing
• The colonial period and the Puritans
• The early national period and the rhetoric of independence
• The 19th Century and the Civil War period
• The 20th Century, including Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
• The 21st Century and the future of American women s writing
• Feminism, sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism.

The volume examines the ways in which both canonical and lesser known women writers from diverse class and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, and giving particular attention to the ways writers worked both inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create a space for women's voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. This valuable introduction offers a readable, cohesive narrative of the development of literature by American women and a refreshing range of perspectives. It also includes bullet point summaries and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, making it particularly useful for students."

James Baldwin in Context provides a wide-ranging collection of approaches to the work of an essential black American author who is just as relevant now as he was during his turbulent heyday in the mid-twentieth century. The perspectives range from those who knew Baldwin personally, to scholars who have dedicated decades to studying him, to a new generation of scholars for whom Baldwin is nearly a historical figure. This collection complements the ever-growing body of scholarship on Baldwin by combining traditional inroads into his work, such as music and expatriation, with new approaches, such as intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Among the many gifted African American authors who emerged in the 1970s and 80s, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most challenging and innovative. His analytical mind can turn almost any topic into an intellectual adventure, whether it is playground basketball, the blues, the prison experience, father-son relationships, or the stories he lived or heard growing up in the impoverished section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. In Understanding John Edgar Wideman, D. Quentin Miller offers a comprehensive overview of Wideman's writings, which range from the critically acclaimed books of the Homewood Trilogy to lesser known writings such as the early novels A Glance Away and The Lynchers. Notably Miller includes the first scholarly analysis of Writing to Save a Life, Wideman's recently published meditation on the military trial and execution of the father of civil rights martyr Emmett Till. In his fiction, nonfiction, and works that artfully combine both forms, Wideman has employed a multilayered and often difficult writing style in order to explore a wide range of topics. Miller tackles such topics as African American folk history, the intersection of personal and public history, the confluence of oral and written traditions, and the quest for meaning in nihilistic urban settings where black families struggle against crime, poverty, and despair. Miller also shows how Wideman's singular personal history is interwoven into his writings. His impressive accomplishments, including an Ivy League education and numerous literary honors, have come alongside family tragedies. By the time his sixth novel was published, both his brother and son were serving life sentences for murder, a source of anguish that he wrestled with in Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong. Wideman writes with such authority on so many subjects that readers frequently have no idea what to expect with a new publication. Understanding John Edgar Wideman is thus a necessary guide to a prolific, varied, and essential oeuvre.

History has not been kind to the 1980s. The decade is often associated with absurd fashion choices, neo-Conservatism in the Reagan/Bush years, the AIDS crisis, Wall Street ethics, and uninspired television, film, and music. Yet the literature of the 1980s is undeniably rich and lasting. American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 seeks to frame some of the decade's greatest achievements such as Toni Morrison's monumental novel Beloved and to consider some of the trends that began in the 1980s and developed thereafter, including the origins of the graphic novel, prison literature, and the opening of multiculturalism vis-a-vis the 'canon wars'. This volume argues not only for the importance of 1980s American literature, but also for its centrality in understanding trends and trajectories in all contemporary literature against the broader background of culture. This volume serves as both an introduction and a deep consideration of the literary culture of our most maligned decade.