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...