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Shakespeare for Use and Pleasure: Elizabeth Nunez's and Terry McMillan's Middlebrow Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2019
Abstract
This essay investigates how Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter (2006) and Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) engage with Shakespeare. By taking a middlebrow approach that emphasizes readers’ use of and pleasure in Shakespeare and that aims to cultivate an inclusive multiracial readership, Nunez and McMillan show that black readers can lay claim to a Shakespeare that they participate in (re)defining. While Nunez's novel frames Shakespeare's political uses within pleasurable genres of contemporary popular fiction, McMillan suggests that she and her readers can remake Shakespeare, the name of her heroine's love interest, into a figure associated with pleasure.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019
References
1 Nunez, Elizabeth, “Channeling Shakespeare,” Black Issues Book Review, 8, 2 (March–April 2006), 25Google Scholar.
2 Representative is Bryan Curtis's backhanded compliment in a 2005 piece for Slate: “Terry McMillan is such a sly charmer that you wish there were a little more going on in her novels … She has either the most novelistic talent of any chick-lit writer, or the most chick-lit talent of any literary novelist.” Bryan Curtis, “Terry McMillan: Waiting to Excel,” Slate, 4 Aug., 2005, at www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_middlebrow/2005/08/terry_mcmillan.html.
3 Quoted in Clem Richardson, “No Novel to Her Call Putting Black Literature on a Higher Shelf,” New York Daily News, 3 April 2000, at www.nydailynews.com/archives/boroughs/no-call-putting-black-literature-higher-shelf-article-1.865323.
4 For a more historically attuned perspective see Dubey, Madhu, “‘Even Some Fiction Might Be Useful’: African American Women Novelists,” in Mitchell, Angelyn and Taylor, Danielle K., eds., The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 150–67, 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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9 Ibid., 15.
10 Nunez, Elizabeth, Prospero's Daughter (New York: Random House/Ballantine, 2006), 218Google Scholar. Hereafter cited in the text.
11 Alison Donnell (in conversation with Elizabeth Nunez), “Prospero's Daughter: Recovering Caribbean Wo/men,” MaComère, 10 (2008), special section on Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter, 43–64, 57.
12 Ibid., 45.
13 Nunez seems influenced by Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991), which not only reworked King Lear in the voices of the maligned Goneril and Regan but recast the narrative around the Lear figure's incestuous abuse. Doan, Janice and Hodges, Devon, Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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