Black Middle Ages

Matthew X. Vernon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, USA.

• 1. Introduction- Reading Out of Time: Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages.- 2. Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in Early African-American Scholarship and Curricula.- 3. Failed Knights and Broken Narratives: Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt’s Black Romance.- 4. History, Genealogy, and Gerald of Wales: Medieval Theories of Ethnicity and their Afterlives.- 5. Other Families: Dryden’s Theory of Congeniality in Dante, Chaucer, and Naylor.- 6. Coda- True and Imaginary History in Django Unchained.

“A volume consisting of four chapters that all stand alone and conclude with their own bibliography. … While each chapter stands all on its own, the volume concludes with an index for the entire book.” (Albrecht Classen, Mediaevistik, Vol. 32 (1), 2019)