From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

This Companion brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature.

In seminal works such as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time, acclaimed author and social critic James Baldwin (1924–1987) expresses his profound belief that writers have the power to transform society, to engage the public, and to inspire and channel conversation to achieve lasting change. While Baldwin is best known for his writings on racial consciousness and injustice, he is also one of the country's most eloquent theorists of democratic life and the national psyche. In A Political Companion to James Baldwin, a group of prominent scholars assess the prolific author's relevance to present-day political challenges. Together, they address Baldwin as a democratic theorist, activist, and citizen, examining his writings on the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women's rights. They investigate the ways in which his work speaks to and galvanizes a collective American polity, and explore his views on the political implications of individual experience in relation to race and gender. This volume not only considers Baldwin's works within their own historical context, but also applies the author's insights to recent events such as the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing his faith in the connections between the past and present. These incisive essays will encourage a new reading of Baldwin that celebrates his significant contributions to political and democratic theory.

This book demonstrates how certain African American writers radically re-envisioned core American ideals in order to make them serviceable for racial justice. Each writer's unprecedented reconstruction of key American values has the potential to energize American citizenship today.

This companion, appropriate for the lay reader and researcher alike, provides analysis of characters, plots, humor, symbols, philosophies, and classic themes from the writings and tellings of Leslie Marmon Silko, the celebrated novelist, poet, memoirist and Native American wisewoman. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Silko's multiracial heritage, life and works, followed by a family tree of the Leslie-Marmon families that clarifies relationships of the people who fill her autobiographical musings. In the main text, 87 A-to-Z entries combine literary and cultural commentary with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Back matter includes a glossary of Pueblo terms and a list of 43 questions for research, writing projects, and discussion. This much-needed text will aid both scholars and casual readers interested in the work and career of the first internationally-acclaimed native woman author in the United States.

Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of color--including Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko--Channette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novel's disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change.

The book studies the history and theory of the essay and its social, political, and aesthetic contexts.

In the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Zadie Smith and many others, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st-century culture. The Essay at the Limits brings together leading scholars to explore the theory, the poetics and the future of the form. The book links the formal innovations and new voices that have emerged in the 21st-century essay to the history and theory of the essay. In so doing, it surveys the essay from its origins to its relation to contemporary cultural forms, from the novel to poetry, film to music, and from political articles to intimate lyrical expressions. The book examines work by writers such as: Theodor W. Adorno, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Brian Dillon, Jean Genet, William Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ben Lerner, Audre Lorde, Oscar Wilde, Michel de Montaigne, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Wallace Stevens, Eliot Weinberger and Virginia Woolf.

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of African American literary studies Selects literary texts according to extensive research on classroom adoptions, scholarship, and the expert opinions of leading professors Organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements Includes more reprints of entire works and longer selections of major works than any other anthology of its kind This second volume contains a comprehensive collection of texts authored by African Americans from the 1920s to the present The two volumes of this landmark anthology can also be bought as a set, at over 20% savings.