The Changing Same : Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory [Paperback]

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.

Records intellectual and institutional development of black feminist discourse.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1996

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.

PrefaceSpeaking To You about the Changing the Same
Part I Thinking About Methods
Chapter One  New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism

Part II Ideas of Tradition
Chapter Two  Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage City
Chapter Three  The Changing Same : Generational Connections and Black Women NovelistsIola Leroy and The Color Purple

Part III Undercover: Passing and Other Disguises
Chapter FourOn FAce: Textual Identities in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or Marking and Marketing in the Harlem Renaissance
Chapter Five: The nameless . . . Shameful Impulse : Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing

Part IV The Reader in the Text
Chapter SixBoundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kine  Sula
Chapter Seven: Reading Family Matters

Part V Hesitating Between Tenses or Allegories of History
Chapter EightWitnessing Slavery AFter FreedomDessa Rose
Chapter NineTransferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The Practice of Theory