Description:
Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White examines how generations of Black and white Southern writers transformed oral storytelling traditions into enduring literary art. Through innovative pairings of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Ernest Gaines, and Ellen Douglas, Sarah Gilbreath Ford reveals the complex network of shared influences, cultural exchanges, and narrative strategies that shaped Southern literature. The book offers fresh insight into the ways storytelling crosses racial boundaries while illuminating the intertwined histories of Southern and African American literary traditions. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and readers interested in Southern studies, African American literature, American literary history, folklore, and narrative theory.
Review Quotes:
"Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White is a significant contribution to literary scholarship of the US South and an important resource for those interested in studies of the self, oral storytelling, and narrative influences in southern and African American literature."--South Central Review
"Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White breaks down barriers of literary approaches to southern writers and southern writing in terms of color, gender, and storytelling techniques. Ford urges scholars and teachers to look again at what they have assumed to be solidified, to shake loose the dirt of possibility, and to allow some connections to spring forth that have otherwise been barred by artificial and limited approaches to southern writing and race. Ford puts black and white writers and their works in conversation with each other in ways that showcase blending without dissolution. The fact that the author explores these ticklish issues in an effort to gauge how features of oral storytelling saturate the narratives of African American and white southern writers who may not consciously be aware of how black, white, and blended traditions influence their creativity is the true merit of this volume."--Trudier Harris, author of Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South and The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South