Themes and Portraiture in the Fiction of Ann Allen Shockley

This doctoral dissertation, Theme and Portraiture in the Fictions of Ann Allen Shockley, is a ground-breaking work. It reintroduced Southern writer, Ann Allen Shockley to the academy of contemporary American literature. Shockley's work provided the foundation for such writings on lesbians and black women as later appeared in the work of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Her inclusion of African-American lesbian characters in novels and short stories during the era of the turbulent 60s, 70s and 80s were not well met by critics and often were given short shrift. Reviewers dismissed the storylines out of hand. But the novels, Loving Her, Say Jesus and Come to Me, and The Black White of It (a short story collection) set the template for further exploration of this oft demonized character type. Bogus' dissertation attempted to traced the historical presentation of the lesbian character through slave narrative to her emergence in fictions such as Young Man with a Horn. Bogus also indentified the cultural trends that marked African-American literary efforts and which served to keep Black women out of the literary canon of American writers. The work is ambitious in its overview and review but the best chapters of the work include, the intense analysis of the reviewers' commentary, the chapter on the Queen B figure in American literature, and the chapter that discusses a theory of portraiture, the "Paradigm of the Considered Whole." This dissertation ought to have long ago published by the University of Tennesee Press, but a transition in staffing disrupted the publication plans.