Richard Wright

ALICE MIKAL CRAVEN is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, France. WILLIAM E. DOW is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris-Est, France.

"Richard Wright is a welcome addition to Wright scholarship, especially the essays that explore the inflections of social justice in Wright's global vision and transnational modernism or offer provocative readings of individual texts, such as A Father's Law. The volume establishes the continuing importance of Wright's perspectives in literary and cultural studies today through a renewed engagement in comparative frameworks with his fiction and non-fiction from the 1940s and the 1950s." - Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of English, Ohio University "Richard Wright's role in the history of our present is the beating heart of this indispensable collection of essays. By paying much needed attention to his late and unpublished writings, neglected details of his exile from the United States, and his influence on contemporaries as diverse as Carson McCullers and George Lamming, these essays reveal Wright as a revolutionary prophet of the Global South, the transatlantic diaspora, and the postcolonial world. Wright resurfaces here as a rogue fugitive of capitalist modernity: the man who thankfully knew too much." - Bill V. Mullen, Professor of English and American Studies, Purdue University

• Introduction; A.Mikal Craven & W.E.Dow PART I: '(RE)PLACING RICHARD WRIGHT' From New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair Modern and Post-Modern Eden: Richard Wright; R.Baxter Miller Wright Among the 'G-Men': How the FBI Framed Paris Noir; W.J.Maxwell A Father's Law, 1950s Masculinity, and Richard Wright's Agony Over Integration; L.Cassuto Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe: Richard Wright's Use of His Southern Religious Background in Black Boy (American Hunger); R.J.Butler PART II: 'TAKING SIDES: RACISM AND SPATIAL DIMENSIONS' 'White People to Either Side': Native Son and the Poetics of Space; I.Soto Becoming Richard Wright: Space and the WPA; T.M.Davis PART III: 'WRIGHT: PULP AND MEDIA, REALITY AND FICTION' Savage Holiday: Documentary Noir and True Crime in 12 Million Black Voices; P.Rabinowitz A Father's Law and Black Metropolis: Intellectual Growth and Literary Vision; J.A.Joyce A Queer Finale: Sympathy and Privacy in Wright's A Father's Law; J.C.Charles PART IV: 'WRIGHT: NEW COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORKS' Changing Texts: Censorship, 'Reality' and Fiction in Native Son; C.Raynaud 'The Astonishing Humanity': Domestic Discourses in the Friendship and Fiction of Richard Wright and Carson McCullers; J.Ulin When Wright Bid McKay Break Bread: Tracing Black Transnational Geneaology; G.Holcomb The Political Art of Wright's 'Fire and Cloud'; R.Shulman Richard Wright and the CircumCaribbean; J.Lowe