EN 240 American Literature: Realism

James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the fictional account of the life of a young American man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With his bi-racial heritage, the Ex-Colored Man is faced with the choice of embracing his black culture and its ragtime music, or passing as a white man and living a mediocre middle-class existence. While not actually an autobiography, Johnson based the book on his own life and the lives of people he knew.

Specially commissioned essays examine all of Dickinson's major writings, and places her work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. It features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

The essays in this Companion treat a wide range of Chopin's stories and novels, drawing her relationship with other writers, genres and literary developments, and pay close attention to the transatlantic dimension of her work. The result is a collection that brings a fresh perspective to Chopin's writing, one that will appeal to researchers and students of American, nineteenth-century, and feminist literature.

A collection of critical essays on the great 19th century American poet redefines the life and art of Whitman in contemporary terms, exploring such issues as modernism, feminism, and the poet's changing style in later years.

This volume, "Critical Essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman", is the most comprehensive collection of essays ever published on this important writer, who has recently emerged as a subject for intense scholarly investigation.

Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture.