SOURCE: "The Circles of History in John Edgar Wideman's The Homewood Trilogy," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, March, 1990, pp. 239-59.

Wilson is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he examines how Wideman combines both elements of the history of an individual family and of American society as a whole in The Homewood Trilogy.

Haydn White, in his essay, "The Burden of History," has argued that much of the imaginative literature of this century has been not only consciously a historical but also actively anti-historical. History, for many writers, has implied the burden of both form and point-of-view: the form of "outmoded institutions, ideas, and values," and a "way of looking at the world," the oppression of historically conditioned vision. This is why, he asserts, "so much of modern fiction turns upon the attempt to liberate Western man from the tyranny of the historical consciousness...