Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches

Applying the strategic essentialism and oppositional discourse for interpreting African American narratives that he introduced in his 1987 The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bell (English, Pennsylvania State U.) presents a sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociophyschological critical history of the contemporary African American novel as a socially symbolic act of cultural politics and narrative discourse. He focuses primarily on novels and romances published between 1983 and 2001. Ann…