The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction - Softcover

To the extent to which du Cille wishes to privilege a number of neglected works, she puts forward vibrant new readings of more than a dozen novels....duCille is always careful to outline the critical heritage surrounding th novels and thereby allows her reader to proceed with an appropriate caveat. (American Studies vol 29 part 1)

Generally thought of as a convention of the white middle class, the marriage plot has received little attention from critics of African-American literature. In this study, Ann duCille uses texts as diverse as William Well Brown's Clotel (1853) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to demonstrate that the African-American novel, like its European and Amglo-American counterparts, has developed around the marriage plot―what she calls "the coupling convention." Exploring the relationship between racial ideology and literary and social conventions, duCille uses the coupling convention to trace the historical development of the African-American women's novel. More than just a study of the marriage tradition in black women's fiction, however, The Coupling Convention takes up and takes on many different meanings of tradition. It challenges the very notion of a single black literary tradition, or of a single black feminist literary canon grounded in specifically black female language and experience, as it explores the ways in which white and black, male and female, mainstream and marginalized "traditions" and canons have influenced and cross-fertilized each other.