Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban

With The Tempest's Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype used to depict black men as slaves, savages, and threats to civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into Calibans, rather than subverting the paradigm. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of the black male writers John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. Coleman traces the Caliban legacy to early literary influences, primarily Ralph Ellison, and then deftly demonstrates its contemporary manifestations

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