African American Gothic

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Gothic—Old and New, White and Black

   1. Introduction: The Gothic—Old and New, White and Black

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 1-32

3. Early Expressions of Black Gothic

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

      PDF

   2. Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Rewritings of Gothic Motifs

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 35-66

   3. Babo Speaks Back: White Violence and Black Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Black Fiction

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 67-99

   4. “The Dark Sunshine Aboveground”: Questions of Progress and Migration in Toomer and Ellison

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 101-146

4. Black Gothic at Millennium’s End

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 147-147

      PDF

   2. “What, After All, Am I”: The Terrors of (Collective) Identity

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 149-183

   3. “Murdered by Piece-Meal”: The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 185-214

   4. The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Reinscription in A Visitation of Spirits and “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead”

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 215-251

5. Conclusion: African American Gothic—Uncovering a (Not So) New Tradition

   1. Conclusion: African American Gothic—Uncovering a (Not So) New Tradition

      • Maisha L. Wester

      Pages 253-257

6. Back Matter

   Pages 259-285

   PDF

This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon.

• America
• fiction
• identity
• migration

'While there have been partial studies of African American Gothic fictions, this excellent book is now the most lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account on this important subject. Nowhere else can readers so clearly grasp in so many examples so well analyzed how African American authors have radically transformed specifically Gothic conventions to make them profoundly symbolic of the horrors and complexities of the black American experience.' - Jerrold E. Hogle, Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona

Maisha L. Wester is an assistant professor of English and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University.

Policies and ethics