Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before.
The project unifies an astounding variety of traditions ranging from early African oral traditions to today’s hip-hop. It covers fables, parables, ballads, folk-tales, short story cycles, and novellas—all the writings included have fewer than 10,000 words. The presentation of this material in a single, cohesive, searchable form—together with extensive indexing—enables scholars to study the writings in a wholly new way.
The collection provides unparalleled avenues of research for students and scholars of literature at all levels. Users can trace the evolution of the genre from its beginnings through to the present, with a comprehensive resource. For instance, with one search, users can find numerous examples of literary devices that are native to black short fiction, such as trickster tales—a type of folktale in which animals exhibit human speech and behaviors.
The relevance of the collection extends well beyond literature:
The North American coverage in the collection begins with Southern blacks such as William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Frances W. Harper, and extends to cover Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Many of Chesnutt's stories incorporated characteristics of the American local color movement, and several were classified regionally as plantation literature.
Through characterization, theme, and incident black writers of the South repudiated the romantic image of the plantation. Chesnutt's Uncle Julius, for instance, contradicted the white portrayal of the faithful black servant, epitomized by Page's Sam and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus. The idyllic portrait of plantation life created by white writers was in stark contrast to the image Chesnutt and other blacks showed of a system infested with greed, inhumanity, deception, and cruelty.
—Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Coverage moves into the Harlem Renaissance and goes up to our days. Key authors include Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Chester Himes, Rita Dove, John Edgar Wideman, Wanda Coleman, and Walter Mosley, among others.African Coverage
The database includes a rich array of materials from English-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The following authors are included: Andrew Salkey, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Ian MacDonald, Claude McKay, A.J. Seymour, Sembene Ousmane, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Richard Rive,and Grace Ogot.
Black Short Fiction and Folklore is available on the Web, either by annual subscription or through one-time purchase of perpetual rights. In addition to the full text of 11,700 works, it contains a rich archive of related ephemera, including sample readings by authors.