The invocation of blood-as both an image and a concept-has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In <EM>Blood Work</EM>, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans. <BR><BR>Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain's <EM>Pudd'nhead Wilson</EM> (1894); Pauline Hopkins's <EM>Of One Blood</EM> (1902); Frances Harper's <EM>Iola Leroy</EM> (1892); and William Faulkner's <EM>Light in August</EM> (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, <EM>Blood Work</EM> illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots-real and literary-of racial identity.