Troy E. Spier, Ph.D.

Bibliography: African American Literature

The following bibliography was created and is maintained exclusively by me. The first section represents a starting point for junior scholars and greatly reflects my own preferred texts. Only the second and third sections are meant to be exhaustive and will be updated as more published and/or unpublished scholarship is found. PDFs are provided only for extremely dated work or those already available to the public. Nonetheless, this bibliography may not be partially or fully reproduced without prior approval.

 Contents
  1. General Readings (Background, Anthologies, and Literary Theory)
  2. Teaching African American Literature
  3. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem
  4. Relevant Academic Journals
 General Readings (Background, Anthologies, and Literary Theory)
30 References
  • Babb, Valerie. 2017. A History of the African American Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. 2006. Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color, Volumes 1 and 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
  • Bennett, Lerone. 1964. The Negro Mood and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: Johnson Publishing Company.
  • Brawley, Benjamin Griffith. 1918/1921. The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States. New York, NY: Duffield & Company.
  • Bruce Jr., Dickson D. 2001. The Origins of African American Literature (1680-1865). Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
  • Chapman, Abraham (ed). 2001. Black Voices London, UK: Signet/Penguin.
  • Clarke, John Henrik (ed). 1993. Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best. New York, NY: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2014. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Gates Jr., Henry Louis et al. (eds). 2014. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 1. United Kingdom: W.W. Norton & Company.
  • ———. 2014. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2. United Kingdom: W.W. Norton & Company.
  • Goss, Linda and Marian E. Barnes (eds). 1989. Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African-American Storytelling. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone.
  • Graham, Maryemma. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Harper, Michael S. and Anthony Walton (eds). 1994. Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
  • Hatch, James V. and Ted Shine (eds). 1996. Black Theatre, USA: Plays by African Americans: The Recent Period, 1935-Today. New York, NY: The Free Press.
  • Hudson-Weems, Clenora. 2004. Africana Womanist Literary Theory. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
  • Hughes, Langston (eds). 1969. The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1899-1967: The Classic Anthology. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.
  • Jackson, Bruce. 1999. Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
  • Jackson, Blyden. 1989. A History of Afro-American Literature. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
  • Jarrett, Gene Andrew. 2006. African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader. New York, NY: New York University Press.
  • Johnson, James Weldon. 1928. "The Dilemma of the Negro Author." In The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture (1892-1938), by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett (eds), pp. 378-381. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  • Locke, Alain LeRoy. 1925. The New Negro. New York, NY: Atheneum.
  • Mitchell, Angelyn and Danille K. Taylor. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Napier, Winston. 2000. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York, NY: New York University Press.
  • Ostrom, Hans A. and J. David Macey (eds). 2020. African American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.
  • Ramey, Lauri. 2021. A History of African American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Randall, Dudley. 1985. The Black Poets. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
  • Valade, Roger M. 1995. The Essential Black Literature Guide. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press.
  • Warren, Kenneth W. 2011. What Was African American Literature? (The W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 Teaching African American Literature
28 References

 Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem
32 References

 Relevant Academic Journals
10 References