View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.Thanks again to Werner Sollors for oxygenating our thoughts on race and identity, and their relationship to that holy dunce, the literary imagination. Intelligently multicultural, this compendium provokes and entertains even as it exposes still-live nerves. Sollors' scholarship is erudite but relevant; his choices speak with tactful passion about matters which touch us all. --Gish Jen, author of Mona in the Promised LandMany startling textual artifacts included.--The New York TimesThe first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.--New York TimesThe scope of this collection is impressive. The introduction is invaluable, providing much-needed context. The volume's topic and scope make it a valuable resource.--ChoiceNo one has done more important work to place interracial association at the center of American culture than Werner Sollors. This extraordinarily rich anthology is an excellent addition to the study of this fascinating subject.--Randall Kennedy, author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity & AdoptionWerner Sollors's dazzling collection will enrich our understanding of constructions of race and identity in fresh and provocative ways and will intrigue anyone who cares about literature.--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University An essential book for those contending with race and literature. With this collection it is clear that race is a category that has been marked both as a boundary that cannot be crossed and as a separation that is constantly breached. A necessary and crucial contribution.--Gerald Early, Washington University in St. LouisRecommended for academic libraries and for any reader working around the race rubric--Library JournalA white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross--or are crossed by--what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.