DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is co-editor (with Arnold Rampersad) of Slavery and the Literary Imagination and author of numerous articles and essays on African American texts.

• Preface—Speaking To You about the "Changing the Same"Part I Thinking About MethodsChapter One — New Directions for Black Feminist CriticismPart II Ideas of TraditionChapter Two — Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage CityChapter Three — "The Changing Same": Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists—Iola Leroy and The Color PurplePart III Undercover: Passing and Other DisguisesChapter Four—On FAce: Textual Identities in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or Marking and Marketing in the Harlem RenaissanceChapter Five: "The nameless . . . Shameful Impulse": Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and PassingPart IV The Reader in the TextChapter Six—Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kine — SulaChapter Seven: Reading Family MattersPart V Hesitating Between Tenses or Allegories of HistoryChapter Eight—Witnessing Slavery AFter Freedom—Dessa RoseChapter Nine—Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The "Practice" of "Theory"