Canaan bound
Subtitle: the African-American great migration novel
By: Lawrence R. Rodgers.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
Subjects: American fiction -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; African Americans -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.; Rural-urban migration in literature.; Migration, Internal, in literature.; City and town life in literature.; African Americans in literature.; Narration (Rhetoric); Southern States -- In literature.
Description: Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration.

He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature as a whole. In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-223) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : The great migration novel form; title: The early migration novel; title: Migration and the Harlem Renaissance; title: The fugitive migrant novel's critique of ascent; title: The communal migrant's recuperation of immersion; title: Epilogue : Post-Ellison migration novels.