From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century. This is the first scholarly book to examine black storytelling as from the frame-tale perspective. The book treats several types of frame texts: short stories as well as novel-length tales; tales that are embedded early in a novel that are referred to later; and tales that appear to have a teller but have no apparent listener.