Narrating Incest in Post-Harlem Renaissance African-American Fiction

This book examines how Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (1970), James Baldwin in Just Above My Head (1979), Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982) and Sapphire in Push (1996) have used character creation as a moment of dramatization where and when incest appears in the background and plays either direct or indirect roles in the lives of characters, especially those who are the perpetrators and/or the victims of incest. Through the lenses of New Historicism, the psychoanalytical approach to literature and black feminism, this book also explores some narrative techniques invented by the four authors in relation to incest.... Mehr