Cover; FROM WITHIN THE FRAME: Storytelling in African-American Fiction; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; CHAPTER 1 ""A little personal attention"": Storytelling and the Black Audience in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman; CHAPTER 2 ''Ah don't mean to bother wid tellin' 'em nothin""': Zora Neale Hurston's Critique of the Storytelling Aesthetic in Their Eyes Were Watching God; CHAPTER 3 Listening to the Blues: Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode in Inviszole Man
CHAPTER 4 The Best Possible Returns: Storytelling and Gender Relations in James Alan McPherson's The Story of a ScarCHAPTER 5 From Within the Frame: Narrative Negotiations with the Black Aesthetic in Toni Cade Bambara's My Man Bovanne -- CHAPTER 6 Would she have believed any of it?: Interrogating the Storytelling Motive in John Edgar Wideman's Doc's Story -- Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary
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 ""fra
