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African American literature is frequently marked by reproducing the black resistance voice to the Euro-American ideologies. However, the traditional literary criticisms tend to treat black literature as a self-closed system away from the dominant culture, overlooking the fact that more often than not black writers must have borrowed and racialized the white literary "envelope" to articulate the black message. This book provides an alternative window to look at the twentieth-century African American literature by analyzing the inter-textuality of the blues and gothic literary traditions within the genres of the migration narrative, African American drama, and detective novel. This approach aims to shed a new line on how the white conventions and black expressions collide and form a contested terrain from which black writers can more potently delineate the racial conditions revolved around the color line. This book thereby will be useful for the teachers and students majoring in African American literature, or anyone interested in the fields of the gothic and blues literature.

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Cheng-Hsuan Wu is the English instructor in the Oxford Language and Computer Institute at Taiwan. He has recently received his PhD degree on the Cultural and Literary Studies in the University of Memphis. His research fields include the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary black fiction.

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