With The Tempest's Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype in the modern era depicting black men as slaves and savages who threaten civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into modern-day Calibans. Coleman analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. He traces the Caliban legacy to early literary influences, primarily Ralph Ellison, and then deftly demonstrates its contemporary manifestations. This engaging study challenges those who argue for the liberating possibilities of the postmodern narrative, as Coleman reveals the pervasiveness and influence of Calibanic discourse. At the heart of James Coleman's study is the perceived history of the black male in Western culture and the traditional racist stereotypes indigenous to the language. Calibanic discourse, Coleman argues, so deeply and subconsciously influences the texts of black male writers that they are unable to cast off the oppression inherent in this discourse. Coleman wants to change the perception of black male writers' struggle with oppression by showing that it is their special struggle with language. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban is the first book to analyze a substantial body of black male fiction from a central perspective.

"This is a marvelous and sustained discussion of 'faithful vision' and its significant influence on African American literature." -- American Literature

In Faithful Vision, James W. Coleman places under his critical lens a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally. The Judeo-Christian tradition, according to Coleman, is the primary component of the African American spiritual perspective, though its syncretism with voodoo/hoodoo -- a religion transported from West Africa through the West Indies and New Orleans to the rest of black America -- also figures largely. Reviewing novels written mainly since 1950 by writers including James Baldwin, Randall Kenan, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Erna Brodber, and Ishmael Reed, among others, Coleman explores how black authors have addressed the relevance of faith, especially as it relates to an oppressive Christian tradition. He shows that their novels -- no matter how critical of the sacred or supernatural, or how skeptical the characters' viewpoints -- ultimately never reject the vision of faith. With its focus on religious experience and tradition and its wider discussion of history, philosophy, gender, and postmodernism, Faithful Vision brings a bold critical dimension to African American literary studies.

"An insightful interrogation of the complexities of religious discourse in the African American literary tradition. Because it superbly translates complex spiritual ethos into literary tradition, this remarkable book is a must for anyone interested in intersections of the sacred and the secular in black cultural productions." -- Southern Literary Journal

"Faithful Vision both looks intently into faith and shows us how to look." -- Christianity and Literature

Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman by James W. Coleman During his career as a writer-intellectual, John Edgar Wideman in his personal life has overcome feelings of alienation from the black community and has reoriented himself as a participant in black culture. In his fiction, as James W. Coleman, the author of this study, shows, Wideman has effected a similar shift, using modernism and post-modernism to bring his intellectual characters out of their isolation and into contact with the needs, concerns, and traditions of black people. Before he could write about this shift, Wideman had to inform himself about black culture. An eight-year period of immersion in the works of nineteenth and twentieth century authors gave him the resources he needed. Using them he was able to circumvent modernism's dead-end, pessimistic world view and at the same time chart a new course for other, similarly estranged black intellectuals. Coleman identifies three main stages in Wideman's career: the early books (A Glance Away, Hurry Home, and The Lynchers); the Homewood trilogy (Hiding Place, Damballah, and Sent for You Yesterday); and the recent books (Brothers and Keepers and Reuben). Blackness and Modernism is the first comprehensive study of Wideman and his novels, and it shows him to be a writer emerging as a major figure in black and American literature. It shows him too as a writer whose progress has been to move away from such modernist masters as Eliot, Faulkner, and Joyce into the rich world of black culture, while retaining modernist techniques. Included also in Blackness and Modernism is Coleman's interview with Wideman, conducted in 1988. James W. Coleman is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In Understanding Edward P. Jones, James W. Coleman analyzes Jones's award-winning works as well as the significant influences that have shaped his craft. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Jones has made that city and its African American community the subject of or background for most of his fiction. Though Jones's first work was published in 1976, his career developed slowly. While he worked for two decades as a proofreader and abstractor, Jones published short fiction in such periodicals as Essence, the New Yorker, and Paris Review. His first collection, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and subsequent books, including The Known World and All Aunt Hagar's Children, received similar accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Following an overview of Jones's life, influences, and career, Coleman provides an introduction to the technique of Jones's fiction, which he likens to a tapestry, woven of intricate, varied, and sometimes disparate elements. He then analyzes the formal structure, themes, and characters of The Known World and devotes a chapter each to the short story collections Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children. His discussion of these volumes focuses on Jones's narrative technique; the themes of family, community, and broader tradition; and the connections through which the stories in each volume collectively create a thematic whole. In his final chapter, Coleman assesses Jones's encompassing outlook that sees African American life in distinct periods but also as a historical whole, simultaneously in the future, the past, and the present.