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Stronger Than Fiction: Literary And Cultural Merit Of Contemporary African American Christian Fiction, Shewanda Larue Riley

English Dissertations

My primary goals with this dissertation are to take a close look at how contemporary African American Christian fiction performs important literary and cultural functions and explore how these works reinforce or subvert perceptions of the contemporary African American Christian woman. The specific texts that I analyze are chosen from 1997-2007, the earliest time period of publication of contemporary African American Christian fiction as they set the tone for African American Christian fiction literary works that have been published since that time. The primary research question driving this project is whether contemporary African American Christian fiction has literary and cultural …