"In Folklore in New World Black Fiction, Chiji Akoma offers an interpretive model for the reading of the African New World novel focusing on folklore, not as an igredient, but as the basis for the narratives. The works examined do not contain folklore materials; they are folklore, constituted by the intersections of African oral narrative aesthetics, New World sensibility, and the written tradition. Specifically Akoma looks at four African Caribbean and African American novelists, Roy A.K. Heath, Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Jean Toomer."--Jacket.