Table of Contents:
  • Criticism in the jungle / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
  • The critic and society : Barthes, leftocracy and other mythologies / Wole Soyinka
  • Repetition as a figure of black culture / James A. Snead
  • Structural analysis of the Afro-American trickster tale / Jay Edwards
  • Negritude, structuralism, deconstruction / Sunday O. Anozie
  • Strictures on structures : the prospects for a structuralist poetics of African fiction / Anthony Appiah
  • I yam what I am : the topos of (un)naming in Afro-American literature / Kimberly W. Benston
  • Storytelling in early Afro-American fiction : Frederick Douglass's 'The heroic slave' / Robert B. Stepto
  • Untroubled voice : call and response in Cane / Barbara E. Bowen
  • Metaphor, metonymy and voice in Their eyes were watching God / Barbara Johnson
  • To move without moving : creativity and commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood episode / Houston A. Baker, Jr.
  • 'Taming all that anger down' : rage and silence in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha / Mary Helen Washington
  • Eruptions of funk : historicizing Toni Morrison / Susan Willis
  • The blackness of blackness : a critique of the sign and the Signifying monkey / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.