Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic

When Houston A. Baker, Jr., one of America's foremost literary critics, first published Afro-American Poetics in 1988, it was hailed as a major revisionist history of both African American culture and criticism. Now available in paperback, this ambitious and enlightening book juxtaposes two of the most fertile periods of African American culture, the 1920s and the 1960s; it includes essays on Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller. This is also Baker's most personal book, an intellectual autobiography tracing his own beginnings as a scholar of Victorian literature, his "second birth" as he began teaching African American literature, and his visions and revisions of a black aesthetic.