This Norton Critical Edition of The Conjure Stories arranges the tales chronologically by composition date, allowing readers to discern how Chesnutt experimented with plots and characters and with the idea of the conjure story over time. With one exception, the text of each tale is that of the original publication. (The text of "The Dumb Witness" was established from two typescripts held at the archives of Fisk University.) The stories are accompanied by a thorough and thought-provoking introduction, detailed explanatory annotations, and illustrative materials. "Contexts" presents a wealth of materials chosen by the editors to enrich the reader's understanding of these canonical stories, including a map of the landscape of the conjure tales, Chesnutt's journal entry as he began writing fiction of the South, as well as writings by Chesnutt, William Wells Brown, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others, on the stories' central motifs-folklore, superstition, voodoo, race, and social identity in the South following the Civil War. "Criticism" is divided into two parts. "Early Criticism" collects critical notices for The Conjure Woman that suggest the volume's initial reception, assessments by William Dean Howells and Benjamin Brawley, and a biographical excerpt by the author's daughter, Helen Chesnutt. "Modern Criticism" demonstrates rich and enduring interest in The Conjure Stories with ten important essays by Robert Hemenway, William L. Andrews, Robert B. Stepto, John Edgar Wideman, Werner Sollors, Houston A. Baker, Eric J. Sundquist, Richard H. Brodhead, Candace J. Waid, and Glenda Carpio. A Chronology of Chesnutt's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass's "Narrative." In an introductory essay, Robert Stepto re-examines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of our most important writers. The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama s "Dreams from My Father." The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass s "Narrative" to W. E. B. Du Bois s "Souls of Black Folk" to Toni Morrison s "Song of Solomon."

Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.

Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy s novel "Alien Land" and its interracial protagonist; the writer s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass and Obama s experiences.

This pioneering study of Afro-American narrative is far more critical, historical, and textual than biographical, chronological, and atextual. Robert Stepto asserts that Afro-American culture has its store of canonical stories or pregeneric myths, the primary one being the quest for freedom and literacy. This second edition includes a new preface and an afterward entitled "Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives."