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Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280665X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Jean Toomer's Cane was the first major text of the Harlem Renaissance and the first important modernist text by an African-American writer. It powerfully depicts the terror in the history of American race relations, a public world of lynchings, race riots, and Jim Crow, and a private world of internalized conflict over identity and race which mirrored struggles in the culture at large. Toomer's own life reflected that internal conflict, and he has been an ambiguous figure in literary history, an author who wrote a text that had a tremendous impact on African American authors but who eventually tried to distance himself from Cane and from his identification as a black writer. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society. That those definitions remain crucial for American society even today is one reason Toomer's work continues to fascinate and to influence contemporary writers and readers.
Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280665X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Jean Toomer's Cane was the first major text of the Harlem Renaissance and the first important modernist text by an African-American writer. It powerfully depicts the terror in the history of American race relations, a public world of lynchings, race riots, and Jim Crow, and a private world of internalized conflict over identity and race which mirrored struggles in the culture at large. Toomer's own life reflected that internal conflict, and he has been an ambiguous figure in literary history, an author who wrote a text that had a tremendous impact on African American authors but who eventually tried to distance himself from Cane and from his identification as a black writer. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society. That those definitions remain crucial for American society even today is one reason Toomer's work continues to fascinate and to influence contemporary writers and readers.
Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812234510
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's writing and subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society.
Author: Gerry Carlin
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847603343
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is regarded by many as a seminal work in the history of African American writing. It is generally called a novel, but it could more accurately be described as a collection of short stories, poems and dramatic pieces whose stylistic indeterminacy is part of its unique appeal. The ambiguities and seeming oddities of Toomer's text make Cane a difficult work to understand, which is why this lucid, accessible guide is so valuable. Exploring some of the difficulties that both the writer and his work embody, Gerry Carlin offers an enthralling account of Toomer's eloquent and exquisite expression of the African American experience. The Author Dr Gerry Carlin is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton. He teaches, researches and has published in the areas of modernism, critical theory, and the literature and culture of the 1960s.
Author: Alix Beeston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019069016X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
"Building on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a new account of the relationship between photography and modernist writing--revealing the conceptual space of literary modernism to be radically constructed around the instability of female bodies"--
Author: Ansley T. Erickson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Over the course of the twentieth century, education was a key site for envisioning opportunities for African Americans, but the very schools they attended sometimes acted as obstacles to black flourishing. Educating Harlem brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to provide a broad consideration of the history of schooling in perhaps the nation’s most iconic black community. The volume traces the varied ways that Harlem residents defined and pursued educational justice for their children and community despite consistent neglect and structural oppression. Contributors investigate the individuals, organizations, and initiatives that fostered educational visions, underscoring their breadth, variety, and persistence. Their essays span the century, from the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance through the 1970s fiscal crisis and up to the present. They tell the stories of Harlem residents from a wide variety of social positions and life experiences, from young children to expert researchers to neighborhood mothers and ambitious institution builders who imagined a dynamic array of possibilities from modest improvements to radical reshaping of their schools. Representing many disciplinary perspectives, the chapters examine a range of topics including architecture, literature, film, youth and adult organizing, employment, and city politics. Challenging the conventional rise-and-fall narratives found in many urban histories, the book tells a story of persistent struggle in each phase of the twentieth century. Educating Harlem paints a nuanced portrait of education in a storied community and brings much-needed historical context to one of the most embattled educational spaces today.
Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334700
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
"Mark Whalen's compilation offers a vital document for understanding the contexts, intellectual debates, and tensions undergirding Toomer's work, including his simultaneous feelings of attraction to and estrangement from rural southern life, the influence of technology on race and urban existence in America and the contradictory pulls of folk culture and modernist experimentation. The collection also charts the motives underlying Toomer's abandonment of the style that distinguished Cane, and his growing fascination with the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in 1924."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Karen Jackson Ford
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817358463
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
A deft study of the evolving literary aesthetic of one of the first avant-garde black writers in America. In Split-Gut Song, Karen Jackson Ford looks at what it means to be African American, free, and creative by analyzing Jean Toomer's main body of work, specifically, his groundbreaking creation Cane. When first published in 1923, this pivotal work of modernism was widely hailed as inaugurating a truly artistic African American literary tradition. Yet Toomer's experiments in literary form are consistently read in terms of political radicalism—protest and uplift—rather than literary radicalism. Ford contextualizes Toomer's poetry, letters, and essays in the literary culture of his period and, through close readings of the poems, shows how they negotiate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) and traditional African American forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At the heart of Toomer's work is the paradox that poetry is both the saving grace of African American culture and that poetry cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, Ford argues, structures Cane, wherein traditional lyric poetry first flourishes, then falters, then falls silent. The Toomer that Ford discovers in Split-Gut Song is a complicated, contradictory poet who brings his vexed experience and ideas of racial identity to both conventional lyric and experimental forms. Although Toomer has been labelled a political radical, Ford argues that politics is peripheral in his experimental, stream-of-consciousness work. Rather Toomer exhibits a literary radicalism as he struggles to articulate his perplexed understanding of race and art in 20th-century America.
Author: Emily Lutenski
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps, among others—are associated with, well . . . Harlem. But the story of these New York writers unexpectedly extends to the American West. Hughes, for instance, grew up in Kansas, Thurman in Utah, and Bontemps in Los Angeles. Toomer traveled often to New Mexico. Indeed, as West of Harlem reveals, the West played a significant role in the lives and work of many of the artists who created the signal urban African American cultural movement of the twentieth century. Uncovering the forgotten histories of these major American literary figures, the book gives us a deeper appreciation of that movement, and of the cultures it reflected and inspired. These recovered experiences and literatures paint a new picture of the American West, one that better accounts for the disparate African American populations that dotted its landscape and shaped the multiethnic literatures and cultures of the borderlands. Tapping literary, biographical, historical, and visual sources, Emily Lutenski tells the New Negro movement's western story. Hughes's move to Mexico opens a window on African American transnational experiences. Thurman's engagement with Salt Lake City offers an unexpected perspective on African American sexual politics. Arna Bontemps's Los Angeles, constructed in conjunction with Louisiana, provides a new vision of the Spanish borderlands. Lesser-known writer Anita Scott Coleman imagines black Western autonomy through domesticity. The experience of others—like Toomer, invited to socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle of artists in Taos—present a more pluralistic view of the West. It was this place, with its transnational and multiracial mix of Native Americans, Latina/os, Anglos, and African Americans, which buttressed Toomer's idea of a "new American race." Turning the lens elsewhere, Lutenski also explores how Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American western writers understood and represented African Americans in the early twentieth-century borderlands. The result is a new, unusually nuanced and unexpectedly complex view of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the borderlands cultures that influenced their art in surprising and important ways.
Author: Keneth Kinnamon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476609128
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.
Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572335806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Narrative, gender, and history in Winesburg, Ohio -- Sherwood Anderson and primitivism -- Double dealing in the South : Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, and the ethnography of region -- "Things are so immediate in Georgia": articulating the South in Cane -- Cane, body technologies, and genealogy -- Cane, audience, and form.
