From Within the Frame

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.