Setting terms of inclusion: Storytelling as a narrative technique and theme in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston

The dissertation addresses the strategy of storytelling as a narrative technique and theme in the writing of twentieth-century American women writers. The representative authors on whom I focus--Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston--reveal regional and cultural values through experimental techniques and sophisticated linguistic structures. Drawing power and authorization in part from the very structure of their stories these authors suggest ways in which storytelling is uniquely able to record and report socio-historical circumstances.;Chapter one addresses storytelling as the authorizing strategy which allowed Zora Neale Hurston to address the paradoxes of her own life and those of women of her color and class in the rural South. The second chapter focuses on the ways Eudora Welty adopts the southern woman's traditional use of stories as indirect social commentary toward her own attempts to expose the details of a woman's life in her collection, A Curtain of Green. Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller is the focus of the third chapter, which explores the difficulty but not the impossibility of capturing the features of oral storytelling in written form. The final chapter addresses the origins and principles of "talk-story," the theme and method of Maxine Hong Kingston's two-volume autobiography China Men and The Woman Warrior.;The dissertation tests the value of recent claims by social scientists and humanists that the stories of literary writers often function as effective vehicles for recording ethnography in twentieth-century America. Although for dominant cultures affected by the information media storytelling is perhaps no longer a method of communicating and processing information, I argue that for cultures long marginalized because of race, gender and class, the unifying and communal effect of transmitting stories never ceased to be vital to their cohesion and literal survival. For these cultures, the traditional way of processing information by filtering it through the mechanisms of retellings, discussion and interpretation has retained its value. Twentieth-century American women writers use the position of storyteller to observe, express and transcend the apparent limitations of race and gender and ethnicity, beginning a dialogue which will eventually alter political and cultural oppression.