Sundquist’s book…helps reframe for a new time the questions, moral as well as aesthetic, we need to ask about what constitutes American literature and about what is to be valued in American culture.
- Paul Lauter, Boston Globe
A major contribution to [the] continuing reconfiguration of the body of American writing.
- A. L. Nielsen, Washington Post
Nothing less than a full-scale revision of U.S. literary history… <i>To Wake the Nations</i> is an indispensable tool for broadening received conceptions of this nation’s literary history, making them both more comprehensive and, in the most profound sense, more true.
- Phillip Brian Harper, Newsday
<i>To Wake the Nations</i> will stand as the most comprehensive and conscientious study of its subject that has yet appeared.
- William L. Andrews, American Literature
Thus instead of literary history that invokes the same, shopworn links between old world and new, readers of <i>To Wake the Nations</i> will discover a not-so-subtle change in the frame of reference from Europe to Africa… This radical reconstruction of American literary history results in a dazzling if somewhat humbling experience for readers schooled in the European tradition. Sundquist’s conscientious scholarship and immense learning set a high standard for future scholars that will not soon be matched.
- Jonathan Veitch, Clio
<i>To Wake the Nations</i> brilliantly weaves [Sundquist’s] analysis of African American ‘sorrow songs’ with textual material.
- David Yaffe, Bookforum
A major work of American literary criticism. Comparable in importance to Henry Nash Smith’s <i>Virgin Land</i> and Leo Marx’s <i>The Machine in the Garden</i>.
Choice
Almost certainly the finest book yet written on race and American literature… [<i>To Wake the Nations</i>] amounts to a startlingly penetrating commentary on American culture, a commentary that should have a powerful impact on areas far beyond the texts investigated here.
- Arnold Rampersad, Princeton University,