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The Negro in American Literary Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Seymour L. Gross
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Extract

OUR understanding of any significant movement in human affairs can hardly be said to even approach completeness until the evidence from literature is in. Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them — Yeats called this process the “public dream” —literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the culture's subconscious. And this is perhaps even more true for the history of the Negro in American literature than for other cultural phenomena — the Westering Movement or the Industrial Revolution, for example — since so much of that history has been an unconscious, or at least half-conscious, masking of issues that have been contorted by fear, guilt, and rage.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1966 , pp. 273 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1966

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References

* This essay, in expanded form, will appear as the introduction to Images of the Negro in American Literature: Essays in Criticism, edited by Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy, to be published by the University of Chicago and University of Toronto Presses in the winter of 1966.

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