Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the "Ancient Power" of Black Women
Marjorie Pryse
1 Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women
Frances Smith Foster
2 Green-eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives
Minrose C. Gwin
3 Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother
Claudia Tate
4 Out of the Woods and into the World: A Study of Interracial Friendships between Women in the American Novels
Elizabeth Schultz
5 The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset
Deborah E. McDowell
6 Ann Petry's Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character
Bernard W. Bell
7 "Pattern against the Sky": Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street
Marjorie Pryse
8 Jubilee: The Black Woman's Celebration of Human Community
Minrose C. Gwin
9 Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World
Hortense J. Spillers
10 Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye
Madonne M. Miner
11 Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni Marrison's Song of Solomon
Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.
12 The Wise Witches: Black Women Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler
Thelma J. Shinn
13 "What It Is I Think She's Doing Anyhow": A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters
Gloria T. Hull
14 Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction
Barbara Christian
Afterword: Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women's Fiction
Hortnese J. Spillers
The Contributors
Index