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As a whole, no pervasive quality unites what we now deem Harlem Renaissance literature outside of the era in which it developed. The inconsistency and varied nature of the works therefore place an even greater emphasis on the editorial processes that produced this canon. While the popular period has received much scholarly attention, the significance of editors and editing in the Harlem Renaissance—aside from the formative efforts of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke—remains understudied. As a remedy, Editing the Harlem Renaissance foregrounds an in-depth approach to relevant editing and editorial issues, offering a variety of voices to become the first centralized authority on the subject. Rather than limiting the examination to a narrow understanding of editorial practices, this collection takes a broad and inclusive approach, exploring not only those figures of the Harlem Renaissance who edited in professional capacities but also those authors who employed editorial practices during the writing process, as well as those texts that have been discovered and/or edited by others in the decades following the Harlem Renaissance. To achieve this end, the collection comprises chapters in several areas, including professional editing, authorial editing, textual self-fashioning, textual editing, documentary editing, and bibliography.

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses' loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational black press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.