Crossing multiple worlds in multicultural literature: A possible worlds reading of Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor and Michelle Cliff

A mimetic approach to multicultural texts assumes that literary representations are reflections of real life situations and persons. Moving beyond a mimetic approach, I argue that the multicultural works examined in this thesis present an odyssey: characters travel across cultural, political, spiritual, and imaginative space and readers follow those characters through their journeys. Applying possible worlds theory to literature written by African-American and Caribbean female writers allows a reading which never loses sight of the political or cultural ties to our actual world, but sees them as altered by the authors in all sorts of interesting ways.