The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History

by Caroline Rody

Overview

The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction--Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven--Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people's founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195350036
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2001
Series:	Imagining the Americas Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)
File size:	460 KB

About the Author

University of Virginia

Editorial Reviews

"Rody's revisionary literary criticism offers new and persuasive ways to understand the 'renaissance' of African-American women writers and of Caribbean women writers during the past three decades.... Rich in its innovative thinking and...rewarding in its textual analyses.... Will provide grounds for discussion and argument for years to come."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"....A welcome addition to a growing body of criticism examining strategies used by fiction writers of the Americas to explore the lasting effects of New World slavery in the lives of contemporary men and women."—Missippi Quarterly

"The Daughter's Return is a beautiful and brilliant contribution to feminist scholarship."—Signs

"Meticulously researched and admirably lucid in style and argument, The Daughter's Return is an immensely readable as well as an intellectually robust addition to and intervention in the critical response to African American and Caribbean women's writing."—Contemporary Literature

From the Publisher