Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic

by Houston A. Baker Jr.

When Houston A. Baker, Jr., one of America's foremost literary critics, first published Afro-American Poetics in 1988, it was hailed as a major revisionist history of both African American culture and criticism. Now available in paperback, this ambitious and enlightening book juxtaposes two of the most fertile periods of African American culture, the 1920s and the 1960s; it includes essays on Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller. This is also Baker's most personal book, an intellectual autobiography tracing his own beginnings as a scholar of Victorian literature, his "second birth" as he began teaching African American literature, and his visions and revisions of a black aesthetic.

212 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 1988

About the author

Houston A. Baker is Distinguished University Professor and a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the National Humanities Center. He has served as president of the Modern Language Association and as editor of the journal American Literature.