Politics in the African-American Novel: James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison

One of America’s most distinguished independent artists/intellectuals, Richard Kostelanetz, has written a prescient volume that uses, as a starting point, the philosopher Robin Collingwood’s notion the the historian and the novelist have much in common, for both atempt to define the largest lines of historical development . Aside from the introduction and conclusion, which were specifically written for this publication, these insightful chapters on four outstanding African-American novelists were composed and appeared in journals in the late 1960s. Kostelanetz saw the writing ont the wall and told readers about it more than 20 years ago. In his analysis of the novels written by pioneering Black novelists James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Richard Wright (1908-1960), and Ralph Ellison (1914-), Kostelanetz culls their political meanings and interprets experience suggestive of political meanings. Kostelanetz places these meanings into a chronological framework that transforms the book from a political or literary history into a history of ideas in literature. This painstaking analysis of fiction - to deduce themes that are then interpreted a intellectual history - is an original scholarly approach to these novels.