A History of the African American Novel

Valerie Babb is Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She has been a professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC and a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont. Among her publications are Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (1998), Black Georgetown Remembered (1991), a book and a video described as 'the history behind the Oprah Book Club selection River, Cross My Heart (1999),' and Ernest Gaines (1991). She edited The Langston Hughes Review from 2000–2010. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York and is the recipient of a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship in American Studies. She has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, and has presented a Distinguished W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Part I. History: Introduction; 1. Out of many one: the beginnings of a novelistic tradition, 1850s–1900s; 2. Publish or perish: African American novels, 1900s–1920s; 3. Aesthetics of race and culture: African American novels, 1920s–1940s; 4. Home of the brave: African American novels, 1940s–1960s; 5. Black arts and beyond: African American novels, 1960s–1970s; 6. From margin to center: African American novels, 1970s–1990s; 7. 'Bohemian cult-nats': African American novels, 1990s and beyond; Part II. Significant Genres of the African American Novel: Introduction; 8. The neo-slave narrative; 9. The detective novel; 10. The speculative novel; 11. African American pulp; 12. The black graphic novel; 13. African American novels from page to screen; 14. Novels of the diaspora.