About the Author

Gretchen Martin, Wise, Virginia, is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. She is the author of The Frontier Roots of American Realism and has published articles in Southern Literary Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, Southern Studies, North Carolina Literary Review, Studies in American Humor, and Mark Twain Journal.

Reviews

Dancing on the Color Line is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies. Original, illuminating, and meticulously researched, Martin’s book examines texts of John Pendleton Kennedy, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain, showing how these writers assimilated and employed black aesthetic strategies of ‘signifying’ and ‘double voice’ associated with the trickster figure. Martin lays the groundwork for further scholarly inquiry, particularly regarding possible lines of influence of minority American writers on modern and postmodern canonical authors and their works."" - Ed Piacentino, emeritus professor of English at High Point University and editor of Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches (University Press of Mississippi)

""Dancing on the Color Line explores the familiar world of nineteenth-century US writing about race to defamiliarize it by suggesting its hybrid nature. Through Martin’s careful readings, well-known figures emerge as deeply influenced by the aesthetics and techniques of African American storytelling, and their literature reveals multiple trickster figures who turn a critical eye on the white power that frames them. Martin’s readers encounter the fiction she discusses differently and with more attention to the complexity of the historical and literary context in which it was created."" - Kathryn McKee, McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and English at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

""Martin has proven to be one of our most important scholars in American humor and culture. Wherever she focuses her attention, and brings to bear her critical intelligence, new insights and useful ideas emerge. Dancing on the Color Line is a thoughtful and enlightening study of the African American trickster figure. The result is a solid contribution to both African American studies and our understanding of the continuously complex nature of American humor."" - M. Thomas Inge, Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College and author of many works on American humor, southern culture, comic art, and William Faulkner