The Image and the Fire: The Subversive Anthology in the Twentieth Century

Racial identity and literary form in the modernist anthologyThe Image and the Fire examines the coterie anthology-a small, outsider literary collection-as a key, yet understudied, instrument of literary intervention within American modernism.Whit Frazier Peterson argues that these anthologies, produced outside of institutional or canonical frameworks, served as deliberate challenges to dominant literary paradigms.Distinct from academic anthologies that helped codify the American literary canon, coterie anthologies were used by both white and Black avant-garde movements to disrupt prevailing cultural narratives and assert alternative literary visions. Through close analysis of three seminal case studies-Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound; Fire!!, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine from the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited by Wallace Thurman; and Black Fire, compiled by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal during the Black Arts Movement-Peterson traces a genealogy of the coterie anthology as