Plenty Ventured, Plenty Gained: African American Literary Scholarship and the New Century

The rate with which volumes of criticism and literary history of African American literature continue to emerge leads to two equally important observations. First, the more scholars and students of African American literature probe primary texts and extant criticism, the more work they find yet to be accomplished in an effort to develop a full body of criticism for a long-neglected canon. Secondly, more than ever before it is possible to discern a certain meditative quality in many of these studies, a fact that suggests a growing maturity in the way we consider literature by and about African Americans. Four recent contributions confirm these observations albeit in varying degrees: [End Page 146] The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 by Dickson D. Bruce Jr. (2001); Rethinking the Slave Narrative by Charles Heglar (2001); Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban by James W. Coleman (2001); and Voices From the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest Gaines by Mary Ellen Doyle (2002).