Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.

About the Author
Jean Wyatt is a Professor of English at Occidental College, USA. Sheldon George is a Professor of English at Simmons University, USA.

Reviews

"This is such an important volume for developing an underexplored area of critical theory, and there is a sense of urgency about the endeavor of this collection, shared across essays. It establishes an excellent foundation for future work in the field."

--Helen Cousins (Newman University), Postcolonial Text Vol 16 No 2 (2021)

"Working at the intersection of race and gender, the insightful and engaging essays collected herein open up space for readers to better understand their own ethical positioning by better understanding the nuances of narrative as a means of ethical communication."

--James J. Donahue, SUNY Potsdam, New York, US

"Offering an important corrective to the notion that black-authored works are little more than social texts, the fourteen contributors to Wyatt and George's collection make a compelling and spirited case for the rigorous analysis of literary form in the works of black women authors. This is an important and innovative book that will help to reorient and reenergize the scholarly conversation and critical practice surrounding the works of contemporary African American and Black British women writers."

--J. Brooks Bouson, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, US

Book Information
ISBN 9780367189280
Author Jean Wyatt
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 920g