Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The long journey
- Part II Search for a form
- 5 The neo-slave narrative
- 6 Coming of age in the African American novel
- 7 The blues novel
- 8 From modernism to postmodernism
- 9 The African American novel and popular culture
- Part III African American voices
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
7 - The blues novel
from Part II - Search for a form
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The long journey
- Part II Search for a form
- 5 The neo-slave narrative
- 6 Coming of age in the African American novel
- 7 The blues novel
- 8 From modernism to postmodernism
- 9 The African American novel and popular culture
- Part III African American voices
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
For many commentators, some of the most distinctively African American elements that readers encounter in African American novels are reflections of the blues tradition. However, the phrase “blues novel” might seem to some to be so incongruous as to approach the level of oxymoron. After all, the two terms comprise widely different genres stylistically. The novel as we know it today, though it has roots in the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom Egyptian prose fiction and appeared in embryonic form in Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Entertainments, emerged most forcefully in the English literary tradition in the eighteenth century with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Novels are traditionally extended written prose narratives with some amount of plot and character development, though the genre has proven very pliable over the years.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel , pp. 122 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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