Table of Contents:
  • Part one. Introduction
  • Some motes in the nineteenth-century eye : on literary taste, the perception of difference, and white images of Blacks
  • Differences in perception : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Walden, and Invisible Man
  • The probable and ordinary course of man's experience : antiromance tendencies in the Black literary tradition
  • The experience of power and powerlessness and its expression in the literature
  • The day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact : the gathering of a self
  • Who gave you a master and a mistress? God gave them to me : the role of morality in Black literature
  • A spy in the enemy's country : masking in Black literature
  • Part two. Introduction
  • Charles W. Chesnutt
  • James Weldon Johnson
  • Wallace Thurman
  • Nella Larsen
  • Jean Toomer
  • Conclusion.