"Slavery is of course an indisputably central topic in American history. Yet to date, students, teachers and scholars have had no collection of essays aimed at an overview of its place in American literature. The seeds of this book were sown a few years ago when I set out to design a survey course on race and slavery in American writing. To broaden my preparation beyond the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century focus of my previous research on the subject, I returned to a long-admired group of essays: Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad's Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989), a brilliant and enduring collection, but a set of English Institute papers that made no attempt at comprehensive treatment--from the introduction by Ezra Tawil"--