Flight to Canada (Masterplots II: African American Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Ishmael Reed
- First Published: 1976
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Parody
- Time of Work: The 1860’s and the 1970’s
- Setting: The United States and Canada
- Principal Characters: Raven Quickskill, Arthur Swille III, Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, Yankee Jack, Abraham Lincoln, Stray Leechfield, Uncle Robin, Mammy Barracuda
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: United States or Americans
- Locales: United States
The Novel
In an interview with John O’Brien, Ishmael Reed once defined the novelist as a “fetish-maker” and the novel as an “amulet.” The language he used is instructive in that it “conjures” (another of Reed’s favorite words) a cultural perspective quite different from the more conventional European one that Reed’s densely and enthusiastically intertextual approach opposes and parodically undermines. Against the linear and largely univocal tradition of the European novel, Reed offers a fiction that is both diffuse and multivoiced, close in structure to the...
[The entire page is 3685 words long]
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