"A major contribution to literary and cultural studies--bold, illuminating, and persuasively argued. Taylor's impressive and richly textured work provocatively resituates social and narrative terrains into a brilliantly transformative matrix of theory, modernism, and black women's fiction."--Karla Holloway, Duke University "The book offers a model--of which there are pitifully few--or how to do theory 'from margin to center' rather than the other way around. That is, it provides a method for reading both oppositional and canonical works from a theoretical position grounded in oppositional literatures. And the success of the method in addressing the most difficult critical problems is strikingly apparent."--Eugenia DeLamotte, Arizona State University