Middle Passage (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Charles Johnson
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: 1830
- Setting: New Orleans, the Atlantic Ocean, and the west coast of Africa
- Principal Characters: Rutherford Calhoun, Jackson Calhoun, Riley Calhoun, Ebenezer Falcon, Isadora Bailey, Papa Zeringue, Nuonyama
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: African Americans
- Locales: Africa
Like so many of the best contemporary American novels, including his own Oxherding Tale (1982), Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage—winner of the National Book Award for fiction—is at once wildly original and self-consciously derivative. Read one way, the novel is an allegory of the African-American’s struggle for freedom and identity; read another it is a pastiche of its own literary past: slave narrative, Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and...
[The entire page is 2813 words long]
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