Dancing on the Color Line: African American Tricksters in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The extensive influence of the creative traditions derived from slave culture, particularly black folklore, in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black authors, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, has become a hallmark of African American scholarship. Yet similar inquiries regarding white authors adopting black aesthetic techniques have been largely overlooked.

Gretchen Martin examines representative nineteenth-century works to explore the influence of black-authored (or nar...