ABSTRACT
The tradition of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century runs mostly parallel to postmodernism but is relatively untouched by its often playful narrative techniques. Only in the last few decades has literary criticism started to pay attention to ethnic voices within the United States. Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple about an abused 14-year-old black girl in the South of the 1930s was groundbreaking. The novels of the Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison contributed widely to the status of the African-American novel in general, while at the same time strengthening a female voice in fiction. The beginnings of African-American literature are intricately connected to biographical topics and the oral tradition of storytelling. Literary history's privileging of ethnic voices in the latter part of the twentieth century, therefore, continues a latent deep structure within American literature, which has been creatively negotiating otherness from its very beginning.
