Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History PDF 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sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the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.

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History PDF Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280665X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

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.

Reading Jean Toomer's 'Cane'

Reading Jean Toomer's 'Cane' PDF 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.

African American History Day by Day

African American History Day by Day PDF Author: Karen Juanita Carrillo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598843613
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The proof of any group's importance to history is in the detail, a fact made plain by this informative book's day-by-day documentation of the impact of African Americans on life in the United States. One of the easiest ways to grasp any aspect of history is to look at it as a continuum. African American History Day by Day: A Reference Guide to Events provides just such an opportunity. Organized in the form of a calendar, this book allows readers to see the dates of famous births, deaths, and events that have affected the lives of African Americans and, by extension, of America as a whole. Each day features an entry with information about an important event that occurred on that date. Background on the highlighted event is provided, along with a link to at least one primary source document and references to books and websites that can provide more information. While there are other calendars of African American history, this one is set apart by its level of academic detail. It is not only a calendar, but also an easy-to-use reference and learning tool.

The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924

The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 PDF 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.

West of Harlem

West of Harlem PDF 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.

The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance PDF Author: George Hutchinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521673686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This 2007 Companion is a comprehensive guide to the key authors and works of the African American literary movement.

Grasmere 2013: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Grasmere 2013: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
ISBN: 1847603300
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This selection of presentations from the Wordsworth Summer Conference opens with Heidi Thomson's fresh new approach to Wordsworth's 'Salisbury Plain' narrative, and closes with Deirdre Coleman investigating the Keats Circle's interest in Indian culture and mythology. Christopher Simons offers an extended treatment of 'Ecclesiastical Sketches' in the context of Wordsworth's career. In other Wordsworth papers, Peter Larkin writes on Wordsworth in the City, Tom Clucas on Wordsworth and Petrarch, Daniel Robinson on an editorial crux in the early 'Prelude', Rowan Boyson on Wordsworth's 'anosmia', Simon Swift on Wordsworth and Charles le Brun, and Richard Gravil on 'sacred sites' in the poetry, from the Chartreuse to Long Meg. Kimiyo Ogawa writes on Godwin, Hazlittt and disinterestedness; Alexandras Paterson on Shelley and Atmospheric Science, and Richard Lansdown on James Montgomery's electrifying poem,' Pelican Island'.

Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing

Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing PDF Author: Tania Friedel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135893292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book engages the critical mode of cosmopolitanism through racial discourse in the work of several major twentieth-century African American authors, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America PDF Author: C. Cottenet
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137390522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane

Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane PDF Author: Chezia Thompson-Cager
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820424927
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Cane one of the major works of the Harlem Renaissance and Jean Toomer's imagist masterpiece, is now a part of the canon in Afro-American literature. Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane is a unique literary tool that explores the brilliance and far-sighted vision of Toomer, allowing Cane to be taught holistically as a discovery process, using the blues motif and the poetic essay. This book's text and figures ground a discussion of Cane's enigmatic and figurative language, connecting the Harlem Renaissance to the Negritude Movement and to later Afro-centric literary movements. This book also reviews P.B.S. Pinchback's legacy as a non-Negro, able to pass easily in white society, the influence of Ouspensky, H. L Mencken's critical work, The Paris Brotherhood, and «Saccaharum officinarum-G.» Like the lunar arcs dividing Cane, the book works as an instructional map. The pictures from the first complete production also tell a remarkable story.