Urban Fiction - Genesis and Historical Forces Behind Urban Fiction

Genesis and Historical Forces Behind Urban Fiction

Contemporary urban fiction was (and largely still is) a genre written by and for African Americans. In his famous essay “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois discussed how a veil separated the African American community from the outside world. By extension, fiction written by people outside the African American culture could not (at least with any degree of verisimilitude) depict the people, settings, and events experienced by people in that culture. Try as some might, those who grew up outside the veil (i.e., outside the urban culture) simply could not write fiction truly grounded in inner-city and African American life.

City novels of yesteryear that depict the low-income survivalist realities of city living can also be considered urban fiction or street lit. In her book, The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature (2011), Vanessa Irvin Morris points out that titles considered canonical or "classic" today, could be considered the urban fiction or "street lit" of its day. Such titles that depict the inner-city realities of city living from yesteryear include titles such as Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838) and Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), to name a few. In this vein, urban fiction is not just an African American or Latino phenomenon, but rather, the genre exists along a historical continuum that includes stories from diverse cultural and ethnic experiences.

Read more about this topic:  Urban Fiction

Famous quotes containing the words genesis and, genesis, historical, forces, urban and/or fiction:

    Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Nature centres into balls,
    And her proud ephemerals,
    Fast to surface and outside,
    Scan the profile of the sphere;
    Knew they what that signified,
    A new genesis were here.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than that something has occurred.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)

    And whoever forces himself to love anybody
    begets a murderer in his own body.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
    C. Wright Mills (1916–62)

    The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)