Fingering the jagged grain : tradition and form in recent Black fiction
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-302) and index.

While black fiction in the '60s and '70s was dominated by political and social goals, recent black fiction uses black folk culture both as content and as the basis for aesthetic form. It values expression, craftsmanship, and imagination rather than a particular ideological configuration. Byerman perceives a shift of allegiance from the social agenda of the black arts movement to the more artistically motivated example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. He shows how folk elements such as jazz, spirituals, cautionary tales, voodoo, and inventive wordplay in the works of Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Gaines, present the variety of black culture as it responds to oppression with defiance, to silence with voice, to imposed order with apparent chaos. The fiction, however, celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful episodes of black experience. ISBN 0-8203-0789-0 : $30.00.