Race in Literature

Showing 1–24 of 51 results

  • Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays

    Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays bundles critically edited texts of three thematically allied plays with an extensive primary, secondary, and textual apparatus. The Cherokee Night…

  • Martin R. Delany: Selected Writings

    One of the most powerful and provocative voices to emerge from the social and political unrest preceding the Civil War, the abolitionist and political activist…

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Selections

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin may well have excited more controversy than any other work of fiction in American history. Welcomed by many abolitionists and met with…

  • Frederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches

    Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist…

  • Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom

    As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an…

  • Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

    Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English.…

  • Of One Blood

    The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard…

  • Hagar’s Daughter

    Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-02). The novel features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic…

  • Heart of Darkness – Ed. Goonetilleke – Third Edition

    The first incarnation of this Broadview edition of Heart of Darkness appeared in 1995, the second in 1999; both were widely acclaimed, and the Goonetilleke…

  • Oroonoko

    The best-known work by Aphra Behn, Oroonoko is an important contribution to the development of the novel in English. Though it predates the British abolition…

  • Benito Cereno

    “Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New…

  • Heart of Darkness – Ed. Peters

    Heart of Darkness is based upon Joseph Conrad’s own experience in the Congo; “it is,” as he remarks in his 1916 author’s note to Youth:…

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

    Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…

  • Iola Leroy

    Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil…

  • The Melting-Pot

    Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish author and son of immigrants, wrote The Melting-Pot to demonstrate how immigrants could become good American citizens, hoping to forestall the…

  • Othello

    Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us…

  • Pizarro

    Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular…

  • Ida May

    The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers…

  • The Half-Caste

    Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian…

  • Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

    The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us…

  • Clotel

    As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist…

  • The Garies and Their Friends

    Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb’s novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their…

  • The Female American – Second Edition

    When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an…

  • The Octoroon

    Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in…