The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 - by Dickson D Bruce (Paperback)

About the Book

The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

Book Synopsis

From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation.

Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole.

Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

Review Quotes

Bruce's book is thoroughly researched, copious in scope, original, judicious, briskly and energetically written, and unfailingly informative. There is nothing like it on the scene: it is an enormously instructive source and a major work of literary history.

--William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, coeditor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature

Bruce's splendid study is a perfect companion to extant works like Bernard Bell's The Afro American Novel and its Tradition and J. Lee Greene's Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century in that it seeks to establish an historical and artistic foundation for the emergence and development of African American character and voice within the larger critical context of American literature. In this regard Bruce reveals a tremendous amount of original research, a thoroughly probing revaluation of long-held ideas about early African American literary output, and a fascinating theoretical barometer by which to gauge early works and their implications for subsequent writing.... [Bruce's] argument confirming the presence of a black voice, coupled with the close examination of issues like authority, control, autonomy, privilege, and appropriation of the black voice, makes Bruce's study clearly one of the most significant studies in African American literary criticism to come forth in recent years.

-- "Southern Literary Journal"

This is the definitive account of the history of early African American literature in the fullest sense, and considers it in all of the relevant contexts.

--Werner Sollors, Harvard University, author of Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

About the Author

Dickson D. Bruce Jr. is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of several books, including And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845, winner of the Southern Anthropological Society's James Mooney Award.