Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature

This book argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Sacraments of Memory thus proposes a new framework for understanding the revisionist aims of these works, contextualizing the skepticism they exhibit towards historical realism in terms of a Catholic counter-tradition in American literature that has long been associated with superstition and irrationality.