Critical Essay | Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

SOURCE: "Black Folklore and the Black American Literary Tradition," in Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, The University Press of Virginia, 1972, pp. 18-41.

In the following excerpt, Baker identifies varieties of typology in African-American folklore by examining an array of literary forms ranging from sermons to blues songs.

"The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves," said T. S. Eliot, for whom the ideal order and its modifications constituted a definition of tradition in a somewhat restricted literary sense. In this sense all works in a body of literature combine to form the tradition of that body, and the introduction of a new work modifies the tradition as a whole. When we turn to an exploration of the black literary tradition, we can hardly doubt the applicability of Eliot's definition. The monuments of black American literature constitute an ideal order, and both the critic...
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