1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910454474903321

Autore

Byerman Keith Eldon <1948->

Titolo

Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction [[electronic resource] /] / Keith Byerman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chapel Hill, : University of North Carolina Press, c2005

ISBN

0-8078-7678-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (241 p.)

Disciplina

813/.5409358/08996073

Soggetti

American fiction - African American authors - History and criticism

Literature and history - United States - History - 20th century

American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

African Americans - Intellectual life - 20th century

Historical fiction, American - History and criticism

Autobiographical memory in literature

African Americans in literature

History in literature

Memory in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-222) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Toward a History of the Black Present; 1 History, Culture, Discourse: America's Racial Formation; PART I. MEMORY; 2 Burying the Dead: The Pain of Memory in Beloved; 3 Bearing Witness: The Recent Fiction of Ernest Gaines; 4 Troubling the Water: Subversive Women's Voices in Dessa Rose and Mama Day; PART II. DESIRE; 5 A Short History of Desire: Jazz and Bailey's Cafe; 6 The Color of Desire: Folk History in the Fiction of Raymond Andrews; 7 Postmodern Slavery and the Transcendence of Desire: The Novels of Charles Johnson; PART III. FAMILY

8 Family Secrets: Reinventions of History in The Chaneysville Incident9 Family Troubles: History as Subversion in Two Wings to Veil My Face and Divine Days; 10 Lost Generations: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Narratives; PART IV. THE END(S); 11 Apocalyptic Visions and False Prophets: The End(s) of History in Wideman, Johnson, and



Morrison; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; V; W

Sommario/riassunto

With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historicall