The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature
Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors, including Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. Accessible to undergraduates and academics alike, this Companion surveys the critical landscape of a rapidly growing field and lays the foundation for future studies.

1. The civil rights movement and the literature of social protest Zoe Trodd; 2. The dilemma of narrating Jim Crow Brian Norman; 3. The Black Arts movement GerShun Avilez; 4. Drama and performance from civil rights to Black Arts Nilgün Anadolu-Okur; 5. Civil rights movement fiction Julie Buckner Armstrong; 6. The white Southern novel and the civil rights movement Christopher Metress; 7. Civil rights fictional film Sharon Monteith; 8. Civil rights movement poetry Jeffrey Lamar Coleman; 9. Gender, sex, and civil rights Robert J. Patterson; 10. Twenty-first-century literature: post-black? Post-civil rights? Barbara McCaskill.

Julie Buckner Armstrong is Professor of English at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. She is the author of Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching and editor of The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation. Armstrong has also contributed to such journals as the African American Review, Mississippi Quarterly, MELUS, Southern Quarterly, the Flannery O'Connor Review and Georgia Historical Quarterly.