Harris, Wier. 2001. Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $18.95sc. 272pp. Terry Rowden College of Wooster Trudier Harris has been one of the most prolific, if under-recognized, presences in African-American literary criticism for the last twenty years. reasons for her relative anonymity for those outside of the orbit of the African-American critical community are, however, not hard to find. Her work, unlike that of her peers Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates,Jr., Deborah McDowell, and Hazel Carby, has not engaged modernist or postmodernist concerns or recognizably theoretical feminist or postcolonial issues with any obviousness or consistency. Nor has her writing been peppered with the linguistic markers that signal a self-consciously upto-date critical posture. Because of the manifestly straight-forward and jargon-free articulation of her insights that characterizes her writing, she has been, perhaps inevitably, relegated to the margins or simply absent from most of the high profile and influential debates on African-American fiction and culture. Despite its strengths, her latest book is not likely to change that situation. highly concept driven and sociologically informed nature of what are still her two strongest books, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982) and Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), has in her recent work, most notably Fiction and Folklore: Novels of Toni Morrison (1991) and now in this book, devolved into an analytic posture that often seems simplistic when compared to both Harris's earlier work and to more fully contextualized critical work on the topic by other scholars. Even in as early a text as From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, Harris was especially attentive to those characters in Black fiction which give the lie to the myth of the strength of black (44). In Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, she expands this interest into a sustained investigation of the textual representation of this myth. Over the course of a series of well-written but critically insular essays, Harris explores the image of The Strong Black Woman in selected works of African-American fiction and drama in terms and within conceptual parameters that should be easily accessible to advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or general readers with an interest in this issue. Still, despite the force of her considerations of particular texts, the most telling limitation of Saints, Sinners, Saviors is that the signal concept of The Strong Black Woman is not given the kind of definitional and conceptual clarity that would take her analysis beyond offering simply another, albeit well-argued, consideration of the received and stereotypical images of black women in African-American fiction. According to Harris, appearance of these images in African American literature and their evolution over more than a century suggests that African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated the literature in the twentieth century and threaten to continue that domination in the twenty-first. …