ABSTRACT
The subject of this book is ‘the mythography of black women writers’. Taking seventeen novels by seven black-American women, Jacqueline de Weever explores the patterns informing their reworking of Western, Afri can, African-American and American-Indian mythological archetypes into new mythologies articulating America’s multicultural reality. De Weever challenges the pet theses of Eurocentric patriarchal scholarship which privileges the Western world’s Attic-Hebraic-Christian heritage, and demonstrates her theses through rigorous analyses of intertextuality and interplay of, to adapt T.S.Eliot, ‘traditions and individual talents’. She thus fruitfully discusses literary influences, a sore point between Western and Third World scholars, without the kind of simplistic racial stereotypes which mar Charles Larson’s The Novel in the Third World. As Jonathan Culler observes in The Pursuit of Signs, intertextuality goes beyond sources and influences to investigate a work’s ‘participation in the discursive space of a culture’, its relationship with ‘the various languages or signifying practices of a culture’ as well as to ‘those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture.’
