From Within the Frame Storytelling in African-American Studies Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Series

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.

Acknowledgements/Introduction Chapter 1 A Little Personal Attention: Storytelling and the Black Audience in Charles 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 Invisible Man Chapter 4 The Best Possible Returns: Storytelling and Gender Relations in James Alan McPherson's The Story of a Scar Chapter 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 BibliographyIndex

Bertram D. Ashe