ENG 232: American Literature Survey

In The Politics of Richard Wright, an interdisciplinary group of scholars embraces the controversies surrounding Wright as a public intellectual and author. Several contributors explore how the writer mixed fact and fiction to capture the empirical and emotional reality of living as a black person in a racist world. Others examine the role of gender in Wright's canonical and lesser-known writing.

Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies.

This book charts new territory in the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical race studies by exploring the political and ethical implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis for African American and other diasporic African cultural production. Focusing on texts by Richard Wright and Jacques Lacan, Mikko Tuhkanen develops a theory of "racialization" that recasts the genealogy of the Western concept of racial difference in terms of the Lacanian argument about the role of the scopic drive in constituting the human subject.

This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003 that examine Richard Wright's writings. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982.

Wright scholar Robert Felgar has written a critical volume to help students appreciate the literary significance of such groundbreaking works as Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy. This study serves students of both literature and social history as it explores the themes of racism and all types of insitutionalized oppression that Wright exposed in his provocative writing. Felgar approaches each of Wright's major works in chronological order, offering insightful literary analysis.

This collection of critical essays on Wright and his works is arranged in chronological order of publication. Harold Bloom edited this volume as part of the Modern Critical Views series.