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Keith Clark. The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013. 257 pp. $40.00.
As Keith Clark points out in The Radical Fiction of Ann Petty, the author for a long time was known almost exclusively because of her short story "Like a Winding Sheet" (1945) and her first novel The Street (1946). This singular emphasis resulted in Petry's works being confined to the category of naturalist protest fiction- not to mention the author being considered something of an imitator of the father of the form, Richard Wright. To a significant extent, this very limited critical perspective on Petry developed because both of these works appeared at a time after the publication in 1940 of Wright's Native Son, a novel that made a vast impact on the maledominated literary establishment and enshrined naturalistic protest as the dominant African American literary mode. Moreover, critics and readers neglected an oeuvre which included novels, short stories, literature for children/adolescents, and essays.
As Clark shows in his groundbreaking study, however, Petry's work offers so much more than Wright's masculine-focused naturalist protest. "Like a Winding Sheet" and The Street have naturalist characteristics, but Clark's close reading of both reveals that the works are substantively deeper and richer than naturalism. One of Clark's two main emphases is that Petry portrayed a black male ontology that differed markedly from Bigger Thomas's in Native Son; the second is that gothic elements in her writing continue an often overlooked mise-en-scène in the African American literary tradition and anticipate the gothic settings and horror in the writing of contemporary black and white American authors such as Toni Morrison andJoyce Carol Oates. There is a gothic...