"Slavery is of course an indisputably central topic in American history. Yet to date, students, teachers and scholars have had no collection of essays aimed at an overview of its place in American literature. The seeds of this book were sown a few years ago when I set out to design a survey course on race and slavery in American writing. To broaden my preparation beyond the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century focus of my previous research on the subject, I returned to a long-admired group of essays: Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad's Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989), a brilliant and enduring collection, but a set of English Institute papers that made no attempt at comprehensive treatment--from the introduction by Ezra Tawil"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Ezra Tawil -- 1. Slavery in the eighteenth-century literary imagination / Philip Gould -- 2. U.S. antislavery tracts and the literary imagination / Teresa A. Goddu -- 3. White slaves in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literary imagination / Joe Shapiro -- 4. Slave narratives as literature / Sarah Meer -- 5. Slavery and the emergence of the African American novel / John C. Havard -- 6. Proslavery fiction / Gavin Jones and Judith Richardson -- 7. The poetry of slavery / Meredith L. McGill -- 8. Reading slavery and 'classic' American literature / Robert S. Levine -- 9. Slavery's performance-texts / Douglas A. Jones, Jr. -- 10. The music and the musical inheritance of slavery / Radiclani Clytus -- 11. U.S. slave revolutions in Atlantic world literature / Paul Giles -- 12. Slavery and American literature 1900-1945 / Tim Armstrong -- 13. Moving pictures: spectacles of enslavement in American cinema / Sharon Willis -- 14. Slavery and historical memory in late-twentieth-century fiction / Ashraf H.A. Rushdy -- 15. Beyond the borders of the neo-slave narrative: science fiction and fantasy / Jeffrey Allen Tucker.