19th century African American literature
20th century African American novels
A01=Bernard W. Bell
African American authors analysis
African American authorship history
African American cultural critique
African American cultural expression
African American cultural narratives
African American fict
African American fiction anthology
African American fiction chronology
African American fiction development
African American fiction overview
African American fiction scholarship
African American fiction studies
African American fiction trends
African American literary canon
African American literary continuity
African American literary criticism
African American literary evolution
African American literary history
African American literary legacy
African American literary movements
African American literary scholarship
African American literary study guide
African American literature collection
African American literature survey
African American narrative forms
African American narrative history
African American narrative traditions
African American novel analysis
African American novels review
African American prose studies
African American prose traditions
African American storytelling
African American storytelling heritage
African American writers' heritage
African American writing patterns
Author_Bernard W. Bell
black literary traditions
black literature studies
black novelists' contributions
black writers' contributions
Category=DSK
contemporary African American novelists
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historical African American fiction
history of black novels
Product details
- ISBN 9781558494732
- Weight: 700g
- Dimensions: 153 x 227mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jan 2005
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, a comprehensive interpretive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. The book won the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the College Language Association and was reprinted five times. Now Bell has produced a new volume that serves as a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001. Bell also refines and extends his interpretive model for reading texts by African American writers, a model based on the vernacular forms of expression of his childhood, the literary theories of Ralph Ellison, and the writings on double-consciousness of W. E. B. Du Bois. T he book begins with a personal essay in which Bell traces the evolution of his thinking about sociohistorical and sociocultural approaches to literature. He goes on to apply these approaches to the work of hundreds of black novelists whose work has been published since 1853. His primary focus, however, is on some forty novels and romances published between 1983 and 2001, including works by Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Albert Murray, Gloria Naylor, Al Young, David Bradley, Leon Forrest, and Charles Johnson, as well as the neo-Black Aesthetic novelists Nathaniel Mackey, Trey Ellis, Percival L. Everett, and Colson Whitehead. In acknowledging the diversity of the tradition of the novel, Bell also examines the science fiction of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, the gay novels of E. Lynn Harris, Larry Duplechan, and Randall Kenan, and the detective narratives of Barbara Neely and Walter Mosley. The result is a book of impressive scope and accomplishment - an essential work for any serious student of African American literature.
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is editor of W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (1996), coeditor of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and editor of Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist (2001).
