内容简介：
Taking the flowering of African-American literature in the 1920s as its starting point, this book offers a reading of a range of 20th-century black American writing. From the streets, subways, hotels and cabarets of New York's Harlem and Chicago's Southside, it moves beyond the canon to encompass often neglected writing by Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay, as well as the more familiar work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen and Toni Morrison. In a revision of African-American literary history, the book examines the creation of an "urban aesthetic" and explores the links between the engagement with the city and fictional reconstructions of racial identity and race writing.