Faedra Chatard Carpenter centers the representation of theatrical whiteness within her chapter through analyses of the plays of four playwrights: Adrienne Kennedy, Douglas Turner Ward, Lydia Diamond, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Although the dramas studied by Carpenter chronologically range from Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) to The Bluest Eye (2006), which reveal a contemporary engagement with ideas of race and embodiment, the author opens her chapter by noting that critical whiteness studies has a long history within African American communities. She memorably writes, “black folks have been analyzing White folks for quite some time.” The novel contributions of her chapter are her emphasis on how the critical evaluation of whiteness by Black artists is part of African American theatre, and her reminder of the power of theatrical spectacle to engage with issues of race.

Leticia Ridley centers on Black Queer drama. After briefly discussing the influential legacies of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, she proceeds to offer a close analysis of select works of Tarell Alvin McCraney (Choir Boy), Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy), Aziza Barnes (BLKS), and Christina Anderson (How to Catch Creation). She reminds the reader of the importance of attending to intersectional experiences as she addresses plays set variably in a private school, church, and nightclub featuring characters of differing social classes.

Samuel O’Connell reads a single case study, Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Broadway musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Beginning with an overview of the relevant critical writings related to whether Black music can reflect cultural and racial experiences, O’Connell contends that the genre of soul music, which Van Peebles incorporates within his stage play, succeeds in capturing the rhythm and politics of late 1960s and early 1970s Harlem. A theatrical innovator, Van Peebles challenged the accepted format of the integrated musical, a musical with a unified (and thematically related) book and music, and pioneered a new type of Black musical form, the fragmented musical, which was better equipped to reflect the racial and political frictions that were occurring in the midst of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements.

Harry J. Elam, Jr. temporally locates his chapter in the “age of Obama,” the period following the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States. After the 2008 election, he notes a shift in the way that critics and scholars talked about race, particularly Blackness. Quoting art curator Thelma Golden, Elam investigates, through four case studies, whether the “post-black” is “the new black.” He looks at the 2009 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Eisa Davis’s Bulrusher, and Fred Ebb and John Kander’s musical The Scottsboro Boys to address race politics, the reemergence of blackface, and the topic of mixed-race identity within the contemporary theatre.

Ariel Nereson spotlights choreography as an integral component of African American theatre, especially Black Broadway. Although she accounts for the long history of Black musicals, her chapter focuses on the contemporary work of choreographers Garth Fagan (The Lion King) and Camille A. Brown (Choir Boy, Cabin in the Sky). In addition to creating substantial employment opportunities for Black dance-artists, Black choreographers have redefined modern dance vocabularies and techniques through their inventive use of moment, embrace of Africanist elements, and skilful embodied storytelling to reflect Black experiences.

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.

Khalid Y. Long outlines the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, following the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer. He traces how theatre producers and playwrights collaborated to create artistry in response to a series of contemporary murders of Black men, women, and children—Eric Garner and Michael Brown among others—often by police officers. Theatre speaks back to this tragic violence in two featured play collections: New Black Fest’s Facing Our Truth and Reginald Edmund’s Black Lives, Black Words.

Sandra G. Shannon celebrates Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Shirley Graham Du Bois for their ability “to expand their worldview beyond the United States’ borders and to inspire, through their dramas, an emotional affinity with the sufferings of people from cultures other than their own.” She bridges these theatrical innovators both by highlighting their interest in Africa and by demonstrating how they were able to employ the theatre to comment upon world politics and with the intent of effecting social change.

This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.

This chapter argues that the short story emerges and develops alongside what Henri Lefebvre has termed the “Urban Revolution.” Drawing on Ricardo Piglia’s claim that “short story always tells two stories,” whose convergence catalyses a “profane illumination,” this chapter reads the short story’s doubled form as capturing a specifically urban dialectic, which expresses the interplay between the determining force of capitalist urbanization, and the hidden histories, everydayness, and revolutionary potentials lurking within. To make this claim, the chapter periodizes the history of the American short story and maps its changing generic forms in relationship to four key moments of urbanization: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance in the colonial mercantile city; Edgar Allan Poe’s and Pauline Hopkins’ detective fiction and Anzia Yezierska’s and Meridel LeSeur’s ghetto pastoral in the industrial city; Ray Bradbury’s and Samuel Delany’s Science Fiction in the automotive city; and Eden Robinson’s SF refiguration in the logistical or neo-mercantile city.

This chapter discusses ways in which the Arthurian legend was transformed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries by French and English romance writers, focusing on the introduction of new characters, changes to the roles of traditionally central characters, and conflicting loyalties and values. Arthur is often displaced from the central role in the plot and can seem passive and ineffective. Gawain is the Top Knight in the English tradition, but Lancelot (a French addition) becomes increasingly important, not least because of his long affair with the queen, which is a contributing factor to the final collapse of Camelot. Family matters increasingly lead to conflicts of loyalties: Morgan le Fay is hostile to her brother, Arthur, and his Orkney nephews grow in number, some loyal but some treacherous. Mordred is not only Arthur’s nephew but sometimes also his son by incest, destined to kill his father. The Grail quest features first Perceval and then Galahad (Lancelot’s illegitimate son); its spiritual values challenge the ethos of secular chivalry and ennobling love. Does this quest bring glory to Arthur’s Round Table, or is it a critique of a fatally flawed society? Important variations in medieval approaches to the legend appear through this period.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives -- in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizes Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.

This chapter explores the origins of the US science fiction short story in transnational print networks featuring Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Throughout, we highlight the significance of women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Judith Merril, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler. The chapter examines how struggles over science and technology shape popular turn-of-the-century stories of young white man inventors and the mostly white man-focused twentieth-century pulp magazine Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. We connect W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” to a long genealogy of US science fiction written by Black people, including earlier writers such as Martin Delany as well as later ones such as Samuel Delany. The conclusion considers anthologies and projects such as solarpunk that revitalize the genre by imagining the social effects of changes in science and nature in relation to new forms of technology, collaboration, and social movement activism.