ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the re-evaluation of Annie Allen by examining it as a book-length response to the Western epic tradition and as a related intervention in postwar constructions of heroism among both white and black male intellectuals. Annie Allen represents the problem of black female agency in the private and public spaces of postwar urban America, as well as in the genre of epic and the discourses of love, war, and nationhood associated with it. Indeed, the awareness at the end of Annie Allen of the lack of political or aesthetic forms equal to the needs of the black community presages Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca", the attempt at a specifically black epic poem that inaugurates Brooks's Black Arts period. To consider Annie Allen in the context of the twentieth-century American epic is to begin to rethink the constitution of that tradition.
