Gloria Naylor's Early Novels

"An outstanding study of Naylor's work! It offers the quality and intensity of scholarship that her work deserves, and it is a significant addition to the body of scholarship that her work has inspired. Its ideas are large, but its language is accessible. . . . All of Naylor's fans will herald its presence."--Joyce Pettis, North Carolina State University

These essays about the important contemporary African-American novelist Gloria Naylor explore themes of race, class, domesticity, and sexual identity--the complex issues that contribute to Naylor's popularity with the general public as well as to her importance in the academy. They show how her novels function individually and how the first four—The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Bailey’s Café (1992), and Mama Day (1993)--work together as a quartet. The essays illuminate Naylor’s vision of a universe that is rich, complicated, and fraught with possibility and impossibility--a world in which "everything got four sides . . . [and] all of it is the truth."

Contents

Introduction: "Everything Got Four Sides"
1. Gloria Naylor's Poetics of Emancipation: Emerging
Impossibilities in Bailey's Café, by Karen Schneider 
2. Women's Screams and Women's Laughter: Connections and
Creations in Gloria Naylor's Novels, by Jenny Brantley 
3. "Weapons Against Women": Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Capitalism in Linden Hills, by Kimberly A. Costino 
4. Good Housekeeping: Domestic Ritual in Gloria Naylor's
Fiction, by Maxine Lavon Montgomery 
5. Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day, by Amy K. Levin 
6. Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and
Bailey's Café, by Dorothy Perry Thompson 
7. "Into the Midst of Nothing": Gloria Naylor and the
DiffJrance, by Philip Page 
8. Framing the Possibilities: Collective Agency and the
Novels of Gloria Naylor, by Margot Anne Kelley 

Margot Anne Kelley is associate professor of English at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on African-American women's literature and on Latina literature.