The republication, starting in the 1960s, of many long-unavailable nineteenth-century African American novels, and the wealth of critical discourses on those recovered texts that have flourished since the 1970s, have led to a profound rethinking of traditional critical evaluations of the fiction written by African Americans after slavery. Rather than as a historically valuable but artistically less significant bridge between the antebellum origins of the African American novel and the celebrated explosion of literary creativity during the New Negro Renaissance, postbellum African American fiction is now being reevaluated as important in its own right for its formal experimentation with, and revision of, a large variety of novelistic genres.