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.
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