UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Contemporary African American Novel
Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches Book Jacket: 'The Contemporary African American Novel' by B. W. Bell

Bernard W. Bell

An essential guide for students and teachers of African American literature

Winner of a 2005 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, a comprehensive interpretive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. The book won the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the College Language Association and was reprinted five times. Now Bell has produced a new volume that serves as a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001. Bell also refines and extends his interpretive model for reading texts by African American writers, a model based on the vernacular forms of expression of his childhood, the literary theories of Ralph Ellison, and the writings on double-consciousness of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The book begins with a personal essay in which Bell traces the evolution of his thinking about sociohistorical and sociocultural approaches to literature. He goes on to apply these approaches to the work of hundreds of black novelists whose work has been published since 1853. His primary focus, however, is on some forty novels and romances published between 1983 and 2001, including works by Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Albert Murray, Gloria Naylor, Al Young, David Bradley, Leon Forrest, and Charles Johnson, as well as the neo-Black Aesthetic novelists Nathaniel Mackey, Trey Ellis, Percival L. Everett, and Colson Whitehead.

In acknowledging the diversity of the tradition of the novel, Bell also examines the science fiction of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, the gay novels of E. Lynn Harris, Larry Duplechan, and Randall Kenan, and the detective narratives of Barbara Neely and Walter Mosley. The result is a book of impressive scope and accomplishment—an essential work for any serious student of African American literature.

"Professor Bell presents us with another groundbreaking study of the 'social' work performed by African American literature. Ranging over subjects including African heritage, masculinity, femininity, and personhood, the arts, and religious and political identities, The Contemporary African American Novel shows us how African American life has always found nuanced expression through African American literary forms. This is a major achievement by a major scholar."
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
"A masterful performance, tremendously impressive as a work of literary criticism and theory, historical scholarship, and cultural study. . . . It will become, without question, the standard work in the field, a stimulating source of critical insight and a valuable reference tool—one that everyone who writes about or teaches African American literature will need (and will be eager!) to own."

William E. Cain, Wellesley College

"Bell’s brilliant new work is a history of the novel that demonstrates the intellectual breadth of that tradition. Traversing a terrain that stretches from the vernacular and oral traditions to contemporary mysteries and romances, Bell’s explorations take us through Realism and Naturalism to Modernism, the Black Arts Movement, Postmodernism, Structuralism, and Poststructualism to Americentric tropes of multicultural identity and community. His readings are insightful and leave much food for thought. . . . Evident throughout is the author’s meticulous thoroughness in clear and precise language that makes it a text no serious student of African American fiction can avoid.”
Nellie Y. McKay, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Absolutely essential to the teaching of African American literature . . . Bell is a rare scholar whose knowledge of authors, works, historical movements, social history, folk formations, and subgenres of fiction is strikingly impressive."

Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Bell's fundamental and profound approach to analyzing and chronicling the history of the African American novel is evident here as it was in the earlier work. He succeeds brilliantly in presenting 'a sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociopsychological critical history of the contemporary African American novel as a socially symbolic act of cultural politics and narrative discourse.'"

CHOICE

Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is coeditor of W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (1996), coeditor of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and editor of Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist (2001).

Black Studies / Literary Studies
488 pp.
$27.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-473-2
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 978-1-55849-472-5
January 2005
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See Also:
Visit the website for the Conference Celebrating the African American Novel: Critical Visions and Revisions of Its Past and Present. The meeting will honor the publication of The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches.

Bernard W. Bell

Winner of the College Language Association's Distinguished Scholarship Award

"If I had to recommend just one book about Afro-American literature, Bernard W. Bell's The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition would be that book. There is no doubt that it is 'the' book on its specific subject."—Studies in the Humanities

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