In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly--the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as "romantic" by major, leftist critics and anthologists. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the...

By showing that Joseph Heller was heavily influenced by the New Criticism and myth criticism that he studied in graduate school, this book discloses that Catch-22 is a faithful and inclusive retelling of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, much as Joyce s Ulysses famously recapitulates Homer s Odyssey. This book shows that what previous critics have understood to be characteristics of the absurdist and Black Humor influence are derived from Heller s faithfulness to the Babylonian text itself. The study details Heller s use of a mystical and Jungian framework to portray the...