African American Short Fiction

doi:10.1017/9781009292863.018

Chapter 13 - African American Short Fiction

From Reform to Renaissance

from Part III - People and Places

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023

Amina Gautier

Edited by

Michael J. Collins and

Gavin Jones

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Michael J. Collins: Affiliation:
King's College London
Gavin Jones: Affiliation:
Stanford University

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Summary

This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

Keywords

African American Harlem Renaissance reform slavery racism Hurston Chesnutt Hopkins Douglass Hughes Dunbar-Nelson Larsen

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story , pp. 206 - 220

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292863.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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References

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