Afro-American Studies 244 - Afro-Am Poetry: Beginning 1900

An intensive look at African American poetry before the Harlem Renaissance. It will encompass orature and literature, including folk and popular music as well as the literary output of such African American writers as Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, James Whitfield, Frances E.W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Fenton Johnson. It will also take up the relation of African American poetry to broad political and cultural movements, such as U.S. Republicanism, abolitionism, romanticism, transcendentalism, local color, and modernism.