From
Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to
The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall’s novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall’s fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall’s work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters’ interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery’s wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Wanting Brownstones; Why Brooklyn?
3.
Soul Clap Hands and Sing: Sadness, Resistance, Redemption
4. A “Nation of Diabetics” meets Empire
5. Water and Nomenclature:
Praisesong for the Widow
6. Paule Marshall’s
Daughter’s: Wars of Independence
7.
The Fisher King: New Beginnings and a Culmination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Despre autor
Moira Ferguson is Professor of English at New York University in London. Her books include
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender, also published by SUNY Press, and
Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834.