TY - BOOK AU - Beavers,Herman TI - Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson T2 - Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction SN - 9780812231502 AV - PS3557.A355 PY - 2015///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - African Americans in literature KW - American fiction KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism KW - 20th century KW - Cultural Studies KW - Literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African-American KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; Chapter 1. Relative Politics: The Literary Triumverate of Ralph Waldo Ellison, Ernest J. Gaines, and James Alan McPherson --; Chapter 2. The Possible in Things Unwritten: Kinship and Innovation in the Fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson --; Chapter 3. Tilling the Soil to Find Ourselves: Conversion, Labor, and [Re]membering in Gaines's Of Love and Dust and In My Father's House --; Chapter 4. "If It's Going To Be Any Good, It's Your Story"-. Legibility, [Un]speakability, and Historical Performance in McPherson's "A Solo Song: For Doc" --; Chapter 5. Voices from the Underground: Conspiracy, Intimacy, and Voice in Gaines's Fictions --; Chapter 6. "The Life of the Law Is Thus a Life of Art": Antagonism and Persuasion in McPherson's Legal Fiction Trilogy --; Conclusion --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Backmatter; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison's influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers.For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512800852 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781512800852 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9781512800852.jpg ER -