Research Guides: African American Literature: Finding literature and literary criticism

Finding Literature in our Collection

Where author or title is known
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Searching for a specific title of a book or an author? OneSearch can help! Here are two examples of searches to find books by a specific author or a title:

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Using the pull-downs, search for "Author/Creator Contains" then add the name of the author:

Or, you can just search the author's name in the simple search in order to get every mention of them:

search for gayl jones in OneSearch

These two sources will help you find books that are well-known in African American literature. If you are looking for a book for English 1B, make sure you pick a book of fiction. Once you find an author or title, search OneSearch using the example in the first tab above.

Encyclopedia of African American Literature by Wilfred D. Samuels
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 1438140592
Publication Date: 2013
Icons of African American Literature: the Black Literary World by Yolanda Williams Page (Editor)
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780313352041
Publication Date: 2011

Recommended Books by Black Authors
From The Center For Black Literature

Finding Articles / Books

When looking for literary criticism on a work, look for information on both the title of the work and the author. Here are two searches for Gayl Jones, author of Corregidora.

1. Searching gayl jones and crit* looks for all the books and articles that mention Gayl Jones and critical or criticism or critic. An asterisk (*) looks for all variations of the word.

2. Searching Corregidora and crit* looks for all the books and articles mentioning the book title and critical or criticism or critic.

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Accessing the articles / books

Once you see an article / book that you want, click on the link to read it. If it is a print book, you can reserve it for pickup in V-26.

If it is an article, you will click on the link in the results list, and then again to access the article:

Then click on the database where the article resides. It should open if you are logged in. If you are not logged in, the system will ask you to with your SSO.

This is a selective list of books that may help you develop ideas and context around your thesis.

Literacy in a Long Blues Note : Black women's literature and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Coretta M. Pittman
Call Number: Book Stacks ; PN56.R16 P58 2022
ISBN: 9781496843036
Publication Date: 2022-11-29
Black Samson : The Untold Story of an American Icon by Jeremy Schipper; Nyasha Junior
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780190689780
Publication Date: 2020-07-01
To Make Negro Literature: writing, literary practice & African American authorship by Elizabeth McHenry
Call Number: Open Access ebook
ISBN: 1478091746
Publication Date: 2021
Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.
The Black Arts Movement: literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by James Smethurst
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 0807855987
Publication Date: 2005
James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.
Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon by Lovalerie King; Shirley Moody-Turner
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780253006257
Publication Date: 2013
In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others. The collection is bracketed by a foreword by novelist and graphic artist Mat Johnson, one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary African American writers, and an afterword by Alice Randall, author of the controversial parody The Wind Done Gone. Together, King and Moody-Turner make the case that diversity, innovation, and canon expansion are essential to maintaining the vitality of African American literary studies.
Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture. by Robert J. Patterson
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780813935270
Publication Date: 2013
Also available as a print book.. Using the term "exodus politics" to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights. The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership. He draws on a variety of disciplines--including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology--in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics. Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.
Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature by Maria Balshaw
ISBN: 9781849645164
Publication Date: 2000
Taking the incredible flowering of African-American literature in the 1920s as its starting point, Looking for Harlem offers a cogent and persuasive new reading of a diverse range of twentieth-century black American writing. From the streets, subways, hotels and cabarets of New York's Harlem and Chicago's Southside, Maria Balshaw moves beyond the canon to encompass often neglected writing by Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay, as well as the more familiar work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen and Toni Morrison. In a provocative revision of African-American literary history, Balshaw examines the creation of an 'urban aesthetic' and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstructions of racial identity and race writing. Focusing on the material culture of the city, the visual sense of the urban environment, the class dynamics of urban culture and the crucial importance of consumerism, this study presents a critically astute, challenging and very welcome new approach to a much-studied area of contemporary American fiction.
Pan-African American Literature by Stephanie Li
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780813592770
Publication Date: 2018
The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments,
The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature by Adeleke Adeeko
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 1282071505
Publication Date: 2014
Episodes of slave rebellions such as Nat Turners are central to speculations on the trajectory of black history and the goal of black spiritual struggles. Using fiction, history, and oral poetry drawn from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, this book analyzes how writers reinterpret episodes of historical slave rebellion to conceptualize their understanding of an ideal "master-less" future. The texts range from Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and Alejo Carpentiers's The Kingdom of this World to Yoruba praise poetry and novels by Nigerian writers Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Isola. Each text reflects different "national" attitudes toward the historicity of slave rebellions that shape the ways the texts are read.