7 - The blues novel

Summary

For many commentators, some of the most distinctively African American elements that readers encounter in African American novels are reflections of the blues tradition. However, the phrase “blues novel” might seem to some to be so incongruous as to approach the level of oxymoron. After all, the two terms comprise widely different genres stylistically. The novel as we know it today, though it has roots in the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom Egyptian prose fiction and appeared in embryonic form in Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Entertainments, emerged most forcefully in the English literary tradition in the eighteenth century with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Novels are traditionally extended written prose narratives with some amount of plot and character development, though the genre has proven very pliable over the years.