The Daughter's Return

This work offers an analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction: the novels of black women writers who have returned to their ancestral past. Novels such as Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea" are assessed.

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Caroline Rody's The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction: the novels of black women writers who have returned to their ancestral pasts. In novels like Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, 'magical' black daughters return to sites of trauma through visions, dreams, and memories. Rody reads these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging tinto cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.