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The current study of literary narrative is a vibrant and various activity, marked not by a single orthodoxy but by multiple approaches. Within that variety there are five especially salient issues currently being investigated: nonmimetic narrative; digital narrative; the fact/fiction distinction; narrative space; and rhetorical aesthetics. Rhetorical aesthetics moves not toward a universal standards of literary quality but toward an understanding of how narratives work on their own terms and of appropriate general criteria for judging those terms. These criteria, as a comparison of the endings of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Howard Hawks's adaptation of the novel to film suggests, typically are not purely aesthetic but involve the interrelation of form, ethics, and aesthetics.

Black Women's Stories of Everyday Racism puts literary narrative theory to work on an urgent real-world problem. The book calls attention to African American women's everyday experiences with systemic racism and demonstrates how four types of narrative theory can help generate strategies to explain and dismantle that racism. This volume presents fifteen stories told by eight midwestern African American women about their own experiences with casual and structural racism, followed by four detailed narratological analyses of the stories, each representing a different approach to narrative interpretation. The book makes a case for the need to hear the personal stories of these women and others like them as part of a larger effort to counter the systemic racism that prevails in the United States today.

Readers will find that the women's stories offer powerful evidence that African Americans experience racism as an inescapable part of their day-to-day lives—and sometimes as a force that radically changes their lives. The stories provide experience-based demonstrations of how pervasive systemic racism is and how it perpetuates power differentials that are baked into institutions such as schools, law enforcement, the health care system, and business. Containing countless signs of the stress and trauma that accompany and follow from experiences of racism, the stories reveal evidence of the women's resilience as well as their unending need for it, as they continue to feel the negative effects of experiences that occurred many years ago. The four interpretive chapters note the complex skill involved in the women's storytelling. The analyses also point to the overall value of telling these stories: how they are sometimes cathartic for the tellers; how they highlight the importance of listening—and the likelihood of misunderstanding—and how, if they and other stories like them were heard more often, they would be a force to counteract the structural racism they so graphically expose.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.