The Changing Same

by McDowell, Deborah E.

• ISBN13: 9780253209269
• ISBN10: 0253209269
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-04-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

"The Changing Same" examines defining moments in African American women's fiction and its reception: the "Women's Era" of the 1890s, the Harlem Renaissance, and the "New Black Renaissance" of the 1970s and 1980s. Deborah McDowell maps this history in readings of Emma Dunham Kelley, Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams. She examines representations of slavery, sexuality, and homoeroticism; the reception of African American women's fiction in the 1980s; and African American feminist writing in the "Age of Theory."

Author Biography

DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is co-editor (with Arnold Rampersad) of Slavery and the Literary Imagination and author of numerous articles and essays on African American texts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface: Speaking To You about the "Changing Same"
Thinking About Methods
New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism	p. 5
Ideas of Tradition
Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage City	p. 27
"The Changing Same": Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists - Iola Leroy and The Color Purple	p. 34
Undercover: Passing and Other Disguises
On Face: The Marks of Identity in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or Getting Read in the Harlem Renaissance	p. 61
The "Nameless . . . Shameful Impulse": Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing	p. 78
The Reader in the Text
Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin - Sula	p. 101
Reading Family Matters	p. 118
Hesitating Between Tenses or Allegories of History
Witnessing Slavery after Freedom - Dessa Rose	p. 141
Transferences: Black Feminist Thinking: The "Practice" of "Theory"	p. 156
Notes	p. 177
Index	p. 212
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