Introduction

"You want to know where my ego is?" Gloria Naylor asked during the course of a 1993 interview. "I have wanted," she answered her own question, "and desired and prayed and fantasized about being here a hundred years after I am gone. I have wanted my work to last" (Fowler 151). If the enthusiastic and increasingly frequent critical attention Naylor's work has received is any indicator, her fiction does indeed seem on track to "last." This special section of Callaloo, which it has been my great pleasure to guest edit, adds weight to her claims on the future.

Naylor's desire for a continuing readership in the decades and even centuries to come finds its corollary in her own commitment as an artist to writing texts which conduct ongoing and, sometimes, highly self-conscious dialogues with earlier literary and cultural traditions and texts. Construing the import of those ambitious and sometimes ambivalent dialogues, the focus of early scholarship on Naylor's fiction, remains one important site of current critical attention. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has remarked, Gloria Naylor is unique among writers in her formal study of and immersion in "the history of the African-American literary tradition" (ix); her fiction seems continually in conversation with earlier African-American texts. Perhaps even more uniquely, however, Naylor commands a knowledge of the bible equal to that of many biblical scholars. Her membership in the Jehovah's Witnesses during her teens and early twenties rendered biblical texts the language with which she apprehended the world and through which, as a writer, she shapes fictional worlds; indeed, she refers to her novel-writing as "sacred territory" (Fowler 153). Her use of biblical language, metaphor, and narrative structures thus sometimes seems ironic, while at other times it is quite uncritical. Finally, her infatuation throughout her childhood with Shakespeare meant that his language and his narratives became almost as familiar to her as those in the bible. In fact, Shakespearean and biblical language and narratives, because Naylor absorbed them during her developmental years, arguably constitute a more profound presence in her writing than do the many African-American texts she studied formally in college and graduate school.

Three of the essays in this collection illustrate some of the daunting challenges of recognizing and understanding intertextualities at work in Naylor's fiction. Perhaps because of the deliberate use Naylor makes of Dante's Inferno in her second novel, Linden Hills, the intertextual connections between that novel and Dante, Plato, and Virgil have been frequently explored. But John Noell Moore's essay in this collection establishes multiple other intertexts in Linden Hills, especially biblical narratives and fairy tales. His compelling argument, in "Myth, Fairy Tale, Epic, and Romance: Narrative as Re-Vision in Linden Hills," opens Naylor's text to reconsideration in some exciting ways. Naylor has frequently claimed that Linden Hills is her "masterwork," the artistry of which "people have never gotten" (Fowler 155-56); Moore's essay shows us intertextual connections of which even Naylor herself may not be conscious. Although Naylor eventually revisits and revisions biblical texts in Bailey's Café, Moore's essay reveals that in the early Linden Hills she makes uncritical use of biblical myth and narrative, which constitute the touchstone against which she measures the moral and spiritual corruption of the black middle class.

In "False Gods and Black Goddesses in Naylor's Mama Day," Susan Meisenhelder considers Their Eyes Were Watching God as a significant intertext for Naylor's third novel. Although Naylor has acknowledged her reliance on the storm scenes in Their Eyes in her writing of Mama Day, Meisenhelder suggests even more extensive parallels between the two novels--in terms of narrative, character, image, and theme. By adapting some of the strategies of the earlier novel, Meisenhelder argues, Naylor was able to explore the issue of gender inequality between black women and black men without laying herself vulnerable to charges of "male bashing," such as those she experienced after the publication of The Women of...