"Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years." "This story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage. And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative,...

A collection of thirty-four critical and biographical essays on African-American writers, ranging from slave narratives to contemporary feminist authors, each including a selected bibliography.

Black Metafiction examines the tradition of self-consciousness in African American literature. It points to the short-comings of theories of metafiction founded on studies of Anglo-American literature. While some literary critics situate metafiction within the domain of postmodernism, others regard it to be as old as storytelling itself. Scholars of African American literature acknowledge it to be a distinguishing feature. Critics such as Henry Louis...