Critical Context (Masterplots II: African American Literature)
Before Dessa Rose, her first novel, Williams had published critical studies of black literature and music, short fiction, and poetry. With an emphasis on the lives of black women, her work reflected her interest in the interaction of the black oral tradition with Western history and literature.
At the time of its publication, Dessa Rose was widely praised by reviewers and was listed in the recommended reading list of The New York Times for two weeks. Since then, critics have seen the novel as a significant contribution to the debate about who has the authority to interpret the texts of American history and to the creation of a multicultural literature. In giving a voice to a slave woman, a voice usually silent in the historical record and in the literary canon, and in representing kinds of black experience under slavery that are conventionally ignored, Williams asserts an African American self-definition within the context of the Western novel.
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