Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography

This study presents a contextualized narratology of African American autobiography. The author compares eight autobiographies by seven African American writers from different periods (namely, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) and focuses on both the issue of race and such formal elements as temporal arrangement, narrative situation, narrative perspective, present tense, commentary, unreliability a...