Mythic Black fiction

the long version

Celebrations of escape and revolt: William Wells Brown's Clotel and Arna Bontemps's Black thunder -- Female paradigms in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces -- A necessary ambivalence: Sutton Grigg's Imperium in imperio and Charles Chesnutt's The marrow of tradition -- Visions of transcendence in W.E.B. Du Bois's The quest of the silver fleece and William Attaway's Blood on the forge -- Retreat into the self: Ralph Ellison's Invisible man and James Baldwin's Go tell it on the mountain -- The passage back: William Melvin Kelley's A different drummer and Alex Haley's Roots -- Ancestral quests in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and David Bradley's The Chaneysville incident.