This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

The essay argues that Bishop sees poems as a series of possibilities to be revisited gratefully, shrewdly, critically, neither agonistically as precursors to battle or displace, nor polemically in the spirit of a literary politics championing a school or movement. It canvasses her relation to a range of nineteenth-century poets, focusing first from the Romantic period on Blake, to whose visionary poetics she adds a skeptical element, and Wordsworth. The essay finds Wordsworthian elements in her use of the word “something,” her intuition that crucial moments combine negativity and revelation, and her central insistence on the provisionality of vision. It then suggests that Bishop was prompted creatively by two Victorian genres: first, the dramatic monologue, with speakers liberated from accuracy and articulate in their egotism; second, nonsense poetry, with its minor-key version of transcendent magic and its frequent link of the “awful but cheerful.” The other abiding Victorian influence was Hopkins, along with Wordsworth and Baudelaire an exemplar dynamically observing his own process of observation.

The central symbolic event of the Christian religion appears everywhere in Hughes’s poetry and prose, explicitly and implicitly, as a fundamental metaphysical statement about the human condition. This chapter begins with a discussion of “Hawk in the Rain,” the opening and title poem of Hughes’s first collection, as an update of Hopkin’s explicitly Christological poem “The Windhover,” which leads to a consideration of how the crucifixion has been made less horrific over the years through the use of comforting cultural “roses.” Making much use of the theologian Paul Tillich, this chapter introduces the concept of teleological freedom, of which the crucifixion is a powerful representation, not least in Hughes’s poetry. Key crufixional Crow poems, especially “Crow Blacker Than Ever,” are discussed, and the prevailing critical reading overturned. The chapter concludes with a theological and literary look at Jesus’ death-cry, an act which echoes repeatedly in Hughes’s work.