Frances Smith Foster, “Octavia Butler’s Black Female Future Fiction,” Extrapola-
tion: A Journal of Science and Fantasy, 23 (Summer 1982): 37–49.
Analyzes Butler’s work with a specific focus on race and gender.
Guy Mark Foster, “‘Do I Look Like Someone You Can Come Home to from
Where You May Be Going?’: Re-mapping Interracial anxiety in Octavia
Butler’s Kindred,” African American Review, 41 (Spring 2007): 143–165.
Analyzes the subversive nature of Butler’s depiction of a bi-temporal interracial
relationship.
Sandra Govan, “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical
Novel,” MELUS, 13, 1–2 (1986): 79–96.
Examines the similarities between the nineteenth-century female emancipatory
narrative and Butler’s narrative.
Angelyn Mitchell, “Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in
Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred,” MELUS, 26 (Fall 2001): 51–75.
Examines Butler’s revision of dominant themes such as sexuality, motherhood,
individualism, and community in the nineteenth-century female emancipatory
narrative.
Sarah Eden Schiff, “Recovering (from) the Double: Fiction As Historical Revi-
sion in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred,” Arizona Quarterly, 65 (Spring 2009):
107–138.
Examines the ways that Butler attempts to destabilize the master narrative
of American history and rewrite it as a curative narrative of memory and
history.
A. Timothy Spaulding, Re-forming the Past: History, The Fantastic, and the Post-
modern Slave Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005).
Offers a Postmodernist approach to reading and understanding the slave narrative
by examining contemporary revisions of those narratives that use elements of the
fantastic to conflate the past and the present.
Marc Steinberg, “Inverting History in Octavia Butler’s Postmodern Slave Narra-
tive,” African American Review, 38 (Fall 2004): 467–477.
Analyzes Butler’s work in the context of Postmodernist writing.
Kelley Wagers, “Seeing ‘from the Far Side of the Hill’: Narrative, History, and
Understanding in Kindred and The Chaneysville Incident,” MELUS, 34
(Spring 2009): 23–45.
Argues that two contemporary African American historical novels, by Butler
and David Bradley, use the intersections between imaginative narrative and
historical knowledge to teach their protagonists a lesson about the enduring
presence of American slavery.
—Annette Harris Powell