African American Gothic

Maisha L. Wester is an assistant professor of English and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University.

'While there have been partial studies of African American Gothic fictions, this excellent book is now the most lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account on this important subject. Nowhere else can readers so clearly grasp in so many examples so well analyzed how African American authors have radically transformed specifically Gothic conventions to make them profoundly symbolic of the horrors and complexities of the black American experience.' - Jerrold E. Hogle, Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona

• PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC  Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-writings of Gothic Motifs  Babo Speaks Back: White Violence, Black Resistance in Nineteenth Century Black Fiction 'The Dark Sunshine Aboveground': Questions of Progress and Migration in Ellison and Toomer  PART II: BLACK GOTHIC AT MILLENIUM'S END 'What, after all, am I': The Terrors of (Collective) Identity  'Murdered By Piece-meal': The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved  The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Re-inscription in A Visitation of Spirits and 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead'