Description
Book SynopsisBlack women have been writing and publishing fiction for more than a century, yet little is known of their literary history, their influence on each other, or the significance of their work to the American literary tradition. This title addresses the question of how this recovered tradition reshapes our understanding of American literature.
Trade Review"The most consistently rewarding of the recent anthologies focusing on Afro-American women's writing ... " Modern Fiction Studies " ... successfully [exposes] the core of Black women's writing and confidently [places] it within the American literary tradition." Belles Lettres
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the "Ancient Power" of Black Women
Marjorie Pryse
1 Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women
Frances Smith Foster
2 Green-eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives
Minrose C. Gwin
3 Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother
Claudia Tate
4 Out of the Woods and into the World: A Study of Interracial Friendships between Women in the American Novels
Elizabeth Schultz
5 The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset
Deborah E. McDowell
6 Ann Petry's Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character
Bernard W. Bell
7 "Pattern against the Sky": Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street
Marjorie Pryse
8 Jubilee: The Black Woman's Celebration of Human Community
Minrose C. Gwin
9 Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World
Hortense J. Spillers
10 Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye
Madonne M. Miner
11 Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni Marrison's Song of Solomon
Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.
12 The Wise Witches: Black Women Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler
Thelma J. Shinn
13 "What It Is I Think She's Doing Anyhow": A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters
Gloria T. Hull
14 Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction
Barbara Christian
Afterword: Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women's Fiction
Hortnese J. Spillers
The Contributors
Index
