New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel. Trudier Harris’s introduction traces the history of its composition and the critical responses after its eventual publication; Michael F. Lynch re-evaluates the religious centre of the novel; Bryan R. Washington argues that the text has much to do with the uncovering of sexual identity; Vivian M. May uncovers the shifting identities throughout the work; and Keith Clark explores the quest of the characters for male communitas.

• New approaches to Baldwin’s first novel • Incorporation of current critical methods of analysis • Treatment of homosexual identity and its shifting construction

1. Introduction Trudier Harris; 2. A glimpse of the hidden God: dialectical visions in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain Michael F. Lynch; 3. The South in Go Tell It on the Mountain: Baldwin’s personal confrontation Horace Porter; 4. Wrestling with The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: John, Elisha, and the Master Bryan R. Washington; 5. Ambivalent narratives, fragmented selves: performative identities and the mutability of roles in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain Vivian M. May; 6. Baldwin, communitas, and the black masculinist tradition Keith Clark.