From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) - Hardcover

Ashe, Bertram D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415939542 ISBN 13: 9780415939546

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.

About this title

Synopsis:

This book explores the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in African American writers from Charles Chesnutt in the late nineteenth century to Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman of the mid and late twentieth century. The first scholarly work to examine black storytelling from the frame-tale perspective, the author shows the variety of ways that these writers negotiated the intricate, both intra and extra-textual, relations set up between writer, teller, tale, listener and reader, and provides essential insights into the fundamental role of the audience in the practice of African-American fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0415939542
• ISBN 13: 9780415939546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160