The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2 1920 to the Present

"Gene Andrew Jarrett reintroduces to us voices that we do not often hear in anthologies. Works by Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Mosely, and Percival Everett, among others, glow and sing here, and complete the broad mosaic that Professor Jarrett so successfully reconstructs of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature by people of African descent."
--Nathan L Grant, African American Review
"Expansive, instructive, fascinating and surprising, this magnificent anthology is pieced together with superb editorial judgment and offers insights on every page. Here is a rich, many-voiced literary tradition unfolding across the centuries in all its exhilarating diversity and unmatched power. Certain to become seminal and essential, this is a treasure that belongs on all our bookshelves."
--Zoe Trodd, University of Nottingham
 
"A deeply and dynamically qualitative engagement with the complex history of African American literary expression, from its broad, interconnecting roots through to its diverse socio-political outlook. As Gene Andrew Jarrett attests, this is not an encyclopedic volume, nor does it intend to be: instead, Jarrett provides the reader with a cogent and memorable seminar in the intellectual history of U.S. Black creative expression. Essential analyses of style, genre, and artistic revolutions are present here, allowing each selection to retain its unique contribution even while locating it within collective movements. For instructors, this anthology will provide even neophytes with a rich, layered, and nuanced understanding of a grand tradition; for scholars and lay readers alike, this anthology offers a new yet grounded take on a literature and a people three centuries old yet always in the making and (re)making."
--Michelle M. Wright, Northwestern University
 
"With its recognition of the claims and issues of a new millennium, the Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature - in its desire to unsettle traditions, its representation of African American literary diversity, its playful decentering of canonical protocols, and its delight in the ironies of racial expression - may well be called the first postmodern African American literary anthology. For African Americanist scholars and teachers, this anthology is a long-awaited treasure. With its excellent period introductions, headnotes, textual annotations, a glossary and timeline that present the latest scholarship, this anthology responds to the contemporary moment. Along with what the editors calls a "scholarly and pedagogic ecosystem" that connects the print anthology with an entire audio and visual network of scholarship and pedagogy, this anthology is not only responding to, but creating, the contemporary study and teaching of African American literature."
--Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland
"The Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a welcome new intervention, full of strikingly fresh choices and featuring as many works in their entirety, and as many longer selections of major works, as possible. These volumes will help recast the vast range of U.S. black writing for a generation to come."
--Eric Lott, University of Virginia