The presence of race is seemingly obvious in American literature. Yet many readers either misunderstand the role it plays or simply don’t pay attention to it as a subject worthy of analysis. Written in language accessible for both the undergraduate and graduate classroom, this chapter targets such misapprehension. It first makes a series of arguments diagnosing the phenomenon of racial misapprehension, including the way whiteness purports to racelessness, the overreliance on a Black–white binary, the multiple different meanings of race across time, and the influence played by race and racialization within histories seemingly distanced from racial identity. Second, it suggests methods for apprehending and interpreting racial meaning, focusing specifically on genres and tropes. Both constitute key pathways through which race enters literary texts and through which literary texts, in turn, come to inform how their readers think about and perceive race.

The general observance of Salisbury customs throughout the islands of Britain and Ireland means that the occurrence of distinctive Insular Uses is somewhat restricted. The most widespread of the non-Sarum liturgies, observed throughout Europe, was that of the Benedictine monasteries, including in England the cathedral priories; these nevertheless often possessed their own individual customaries, as did other houses such as those of the Augustinian canons. The principal secular Uses, apart from that of Salisbury, were those of Hereford and York, although all dioceses had their local saints and minor differences. A full analysis of everything that was distinctive about diocesan usages in the provinces of Canterbury and York is beyond the scope of this chapter; instead, the focus is on a small range of comparable matter in the major Uses and in the variable customs of some other dioceses.