The Negro in American Literary Criticism

In: The review of politics, Band 28, Heft 3, S. 273-292

Abstract

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.