The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

A Novel

Keith Clark

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807150689
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In his in-depth analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908--1997), Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a major mid-twentieth-century African American author and the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest." He focuses on her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique.
Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. He explores, for example, Petry's use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in the stories "The Bones of Louella Brown" and "The Witness." Petry's overlooked second novel, Country Place -- set in a deceptively serene Connecticut hamlet -- camouflages a world as nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors -- some socially sanctioned, others taboo -- in her unheralded masterpiece The Narrows and her widely anthologized short story "Like a Winding Sheet."
Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry analyzes Petry's unique concerns and agile techniques, situating her among more celebrated male contemporary writers.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: THE “LITERARY BONES” OF ANN PETRY: Excavating and Re-situating a Reluctant Icon
• 1. FROM GANGSTA TO GOTHIC: Ann Petry’s Unbounded Aesthetic Universe
• 2. BLACK BOYS, HOODS, AND WANNABES: Images of Imperiled Black Manhood in The Narrows
• 3. MASCULINE ANGST REVISITED: The Anguished Black Men of “Like a Winding Sheet,” “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” and “Miss Muriel”
• 4. “OPPOSITIONAL GOTHIC”: The Street and Ann Petry’s Place in the Literature of Terror
• 5. HAUNTING/HAUNTED B(L)ACK: Tormented and Tormenting Souls in “The Bones of Louella Brown” and “The Witness”
• 6. “ENTOMBED WHILE STILL ALIVE”: Images of Domestic Terror and Monstrousness in Country Place
• 7. “A QUEER MIXTURE OF VIOLENCE AND LOVE AND HATE AND TERROR”: (Wannabe) Gangsta, Gothic, and Grotesquerie in “In Darkness and Confusion”
• CONCLUSION: FROM THE 1960S TO THE 2000S AND BEYOND: Ann Petry’s Prescient Vision
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX