Black Literature and Literary Theory

The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms.

This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the o...