The Cattle Killing (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: John Edgar Wideman
- First Published: 1996
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The late eighteenth century and the 1990’s
- Setting: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and its environs
- Principal Characters: Isaiah, the Preacher, Liam, Mrs. Stubbs, Bishop Richard Allen, Dr. Thrush, Mrs. Thrush, Kathryn, J.
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: African Americans
- Locales: Philadelphia, PA
In this complex, layered fiction, John Wideman revisits favorite themes which here assume heightened clarity and resonance. Long a practitioner of modernist textual acrobatics—polyphonic narratives, unmediated disjunctions of time and place, elusive and elliptical voicings often cited by critics as prose variations on jazz improvisations—Wideman also acknowledges postmodernist doubts about the potential of any creative enterprise to relieve the artist’s egotism or conjure up and communicate with its audience. Yet he escapes the postmodern temptation to repudiate claims of artistic...
[The entire page is 2709 words long]
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