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Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

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1: Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 40s 2: A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson´s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 3: ´In the Modern Vein´: Tolson´s Harlem Gallery 4: Bound By Law-Langston Hughes in/and the 1950s 5: Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston´s Hughes´s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ 6: Amiri Baraka´s Wise Why´s Y´s: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic

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"Kathy Lou Schultz´s The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka is a useful contribution to scholarship on the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, with an extended chapter concluding the study on Amiri Baraka." (A Year´s Work in English Studies, 2015)

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Kathy Lou Schultz is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA where she directs the Honors Program.

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