Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Essay on African-American Folklore and Literature, Barbara J. Wilcots - Representative Writers

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REPRESENTATIVE WRITERS

Antebellum literature imposed the distortions of moralistic controversy and made the Negro a wax-figure of the marketplace: postbellum literature retaliated with the condescending reactions of sentiment and caricature and made the Negro a genre stereotype. Sustained, serious or deep study of Negro life and character has thus been entirely below the horizon of our national art. Only gradually through the dull purgatory of the Age of Discussion has Negro life eventually issued forth to an Age of Expression.

—William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature” (1925)

Noted Harlem Renaissance poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite traced the changing face of the Negro in American literature, deploring the condescending portraits authorized by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and reinforced by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, His...

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1. Introduction
2. African-American Folk Tradition
3. Representative Writers
4. Hallmark Works
5. The Study Of African-American Literature And Folklore
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. African-American Literature