The new corpus of African American Writers 1892-1912 (AAW) is now available from the CLiC web app.

The CLiC Fiction project team (Professor Michaela Mahlberg and Research Fellow Viola Wiegand) have compiled this corpus in collaboration with Nicholas J. Rosato and Claiborne Rice of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who had the idea for this corpus and prepared the text files. This specialised corpus contains the following novels:

  • Charles W. Chesnutt 
    • The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
    • The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
    • The Colonel’s Dream (1905)
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902)
  • Sutton E. Griggs 
    • Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. A Novel (1899)
    • Unfettered: A Novel (1902) 
  • Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1893) 
  • James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) 
  • The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
  • The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
  • The Colonel’s Dream (1905)
  • Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. A Novel (1899)
  • Unfettered: A Novel (1902) 
The image for the CLiC corpus of African American Writers 1892-1912 (AAW)
Photos of the authors in the AAW corpus: Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances E.W. Harper and James Weldon Johnson

Given that the corpus is a beta release, the team are looking forward to your feedback on this corpus!  

To mark the launch of the AAW beta release, Dr Jimmy Packham of the Nineteenth-Century Centre at the University of Birmingham wrote a great guest post on dialect and the dead in Chesnutt's novels for the CLiC Fiction Blog. If your research interests and/or teaching relate to the writers in the AAW corpus and you’d like to write a blog post, please get in touch via email or Twitter.

To receive regular updates on the CLiC Fiction project, you can subscribe to the CLiC newsletter. (For example, the October issue introduced the AAW corpus).

If you are considering doing a PhD on the AAW or any of the other CLiC corpora, please get in touch with m.a.mahlberg@bham.ac.uk for any queries about potential supervision.