Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse

Although there are any number of single-volume anthologies on individual writers and movements (e.g. the Harlem Renaissance), African American Writing is the first multi-volume collection to provide users with full coverage of a crucial literary tradition, a tradition that now spans slave texts to novels by Nobel Prize-winning authors, and which is, in the learned editor’s words, ‘intrinsic to America’s self-articulation’.

As serious scholarly work on and around the literary output of African Americans flourishes as never before, this new five-volume collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help users navigate and make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output.

African American Writing is edited by A. Robert Lee, formerly Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. His expert selection brings together the best and most influential critical assessments, evaluations, and other scholarship in one easy-to-use ‘mini library’. The set includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, as well as detailed bibliographies and timelines. It is destined to be valued by researchers and students as an essential work of reference.

The editor of this collection, A. Robert Lee, is a leading expert in the field. His Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003) won the American Book Award in 2001. His recent work includes Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (Routledge, 2010) and a four-volume collection on Native American Writing (Routledge and Edition Synapse, 2011).