James and Percival Everett's Dialogue with US Storytelling

Keeble, Arin

Abstract

This paper considers James within Everett’s famously diverse oeuvre – to date including twenty-four novels, four collections of short fiction, three collections of poetry and a children’s book – a distinctive body of work commonly described as “uncategorizable.” Everett’s broader project is more coherent than such suggestions indicate and while, as a kind of belated major label debut, James is in one sense another in a string of departures, and though it will – and should – be read in conversation with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is much to be gained by considering this new novel in relation to Everett’s forty years of literary output. Everett’s novels have frequently responded to American and world-historical events, from the depiction of post-Vietnam War malaise in Walk me to the Distance (1985), the harrowing response to the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wounded (2005), and the more recent exploration of the legacies of the lynching of Emmett Till in The Trees (2022). This continues in James, not just in its revisionary response to a cornerstone of the American canon, but in its evocation of the beginning of the Civil War. Here, I make two provisional observations: first, Everett’s depictions of historical events seek to understand them within America’s foundational currents of white supremacy and prejudice, contextualizing moments of rupture by considering them within violent systems. Second, James is as close as there is to an exemplar in his body of work. Indeed, ironically, James is both Everett’s boldest act of literary adaptation, but also the novel that most clearly exemplifies the concerns of his writing over forty years.

Citation

Keeble, A. (2025, December). James and Percival Everett's Dialogue with US Storytelling. Paper presented at PERCIVAL - an international conference on the literature and art of Percival Everett, London

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: PERCIVAL - an international conference on the literature and art of Percival Everett
• Start Date: Dec 6, 2025
• End Date: Dec 7, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Apr 3, 2025
• Deposit Date: Apr 3, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4231977