The Role of Urban Life in the Poetry of Langston Hughes

The Role of Urban Life in the Poetry of Langston Hughes PDF Author: Antje Wulff
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640293614
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Trier, course: The Poetry and Poetics of Langston Hughes, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Langston Hughes was an urban person. Originally, he came from the rather rural Midwest of the United States, but he adopted the city as his real home very early in life and remained true to it ever since. In doing so, he acted very much in accordance with the zeitgeist of his period, which was hugely influenced by the sweeping processes of urbanisation started off earlier by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Living in a big city represented a completely new experience in American, and indeed human, history. None of the traditional patterns of life could be applied to it without change. Notably, it has been impossible up to now to find a valid and comprehensive definition of the phenomenon of the modern city, which says a lot about the complexity of the issue. The following essay aims to analyse the way Hughes interpreted the urban phenomenon, for his affinity to the city clearly found expression in his poetry. Although he visited countless cities both at home and abroad, the overwhelming majority of his urban poems deals with life in the Manhattan district of Harlem, which assumed a key role for African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century and can also be regarded as the centre of Hughes' own life. Viewing Harlem as a microcosm of black urban life and using it as a blueprint in his poetic work, he managed to draw a diverse and multi-layered image of existence in the city. Since, naturally, racial aspects are of particular significance in this context, the following analysis will try to examine the various roles played by urban life for African Americans. Thus, the essay will focus first on the hopes and expectations they associated with the city as a new environment. It will then examine whether and in what way

The Role of Urban Life in the Poetry of Langston Hughes

The Role of Urban Life in the Poetry of Langston Hughes PDF Author: Antje Wulff
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640293355
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Trier, course: The Poetry and Poetics of Langston Hughes, language: English, abstract: Langston Hughes was an urban person. Originally, he came from the rather rural Midwest of the United States, but he adopted the city as his real home very early in life and remained true to it ever since. In doing so, he acted very much in accordance with the zeitgeist of his period, which was hugely influenced by the sweeping processes of urbanisation started off earlier by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Living in a big city represented a completely new experience in American, and indeed human, history. None of the traditional patterns of life could be applied to it without change. Notably, it has been impossible up to now to find a valid and comprehensive definition of the phenomenon of the modern city, which says a lot about the complexity of the issue. The following essay aims to analyse the way Hughes interpreted the urban phenomenon, for his affinity to the city clearly found expression in his poetry. Although he visited countless cities both at home and abroad, the overwhelming majority of his urban poems deals with life in the Manhattan district of Harlem, which assumed a key role for African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century and can also be regarded as the centre of Hughes’ own life. Viewing Harlem as a microcosm of black urban life and using it as a blueprint in his poetic work, he managed to draw a diverse and multi-layered image of existence in the city. Since, naturally, racial aspects are of particular significance in this context, the following analysis will try to examine the various roles played by urban life for African Americans. Thus, the essay will focus first on the hopes and expectations they associated with the city as a new environment. It will then examine whether and in what way those hopes were actually reflected in the general attitude towards urban life and in its various forms of expression, and whether there might have been less positive feelings as well. If so, it will then be necessary to deal with the problems and difficulties encountered by blacks in the city as they are presented in Hughes’ poetry. Here, both spiritual and material (that is, economic) concerns must be considered. Finally, since Hughes did not solely concentrate on the racial aspects of urbanity, the wider and more general human implications of modern urban existence laid out in his poems will be looked at to complete the analysis.

The Weary Blues

The Weary Blues PDF Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504073738
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
The first published poetry collection from the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet behind such works as “Montage of a Dream Deferred” and “Life is Fine.” Originally published in 1926, The Weary Blues is Langston Hughes’s first collection of poetry. Broken into seven thematic sections, the sixty-eight poems capture the heart of a young budding artist and the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The title poem, “The Weary Blues,” tells the story of a musician performing in a bar and uses a very lyrical style that flows throughout the collection. Other poems include, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Danse Africaine,” “Dream Variation,” “Mother to Son,” “Suicide’s Note,” and “Winter Moon.” The work touches on subjects like art, identity, race, class, urban life, music, and the Black experience in 1920s America.

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes PDF Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307949400
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Langston's Salvation

Langston's Salvation PDF Author: Wallace D. Best
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479834890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Looking for Langston -- New territory for new Negroes -- Poems of a religious nature -- Concerning "goodbye, Christ"--My Gospel year -- Christmas in black -- Do nothing till you hear from me

Inside Out

Inside Out PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401206171
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women’s engagement with space, this edited book reveals a plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications.

Looking Back at the Jazz Age

Looking Back at the Jazz Age PDF Author: Nancy von Rosk
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443813338
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
From Britain’s Downton Abbey and Dancing on the Edge to Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age’s presence in recent popular culture has been striking and pervasive. This volume not only deepens the reader’s knowledge of this iconic period, but also provides a better understanding of its persistent presence “in our time.” Situating well-known Jazz Age writers such as Langston Hughes in new contexts while revealing the contributions of lesser-known figures such as Fannie Hurst, Looking Back at the Jazz Age brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who draw on a wide range of academic fields and critical methods: New Historicism, biography, philosophy, queer theory, psychoanalytical theory, geography, music theory, film studies, and urban studies. The volume includes provocative new readings of the flapper, an intricate examination of the intersections between literature and music, as well as some reflections on the twenty first century’s preoccupation with the Jazz Age. Building on recent scholarship and suggesting avenues for further research, this collection will be of interest to scholars and students in American literature, American history, American studies, cultural studies, and film studies.

The Worlds of Langston Hughes

The Worlds of Langston Hughes PDF Author: Vera M. Kutzinski
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801466245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation throughout Europe, Asia, and especially the Americas. In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes's autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, she shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes's own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism.As Kutzinski maps the trajectory of Hughes's writings across Europe and the Americas, we see the remarkable extent to which the translations of his poetry were in conversation with the work of other modernist writers. Kutzinski spotlights cities whose role as meeting places for modernists from all over the world has yet to be fully explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and of course Harlem. The result is a fresh look at Hughes, not as a solitary author who wrote in a single language, but as an international figure at the heart of a global intellectual and artistic formation.

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes PDF Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679764089
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 731

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Book Description
The definitive sampling of a writer whose poems were “at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism itself, and today are fundamentals of American culture” (OPRAH Magazine). Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language. The collection spans five decades, and is comprised of 868 poems (nearly 300 of which never before appeared in book form) with annotations by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes Hughes's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.

Connecting Cultures

Connecting Cultures PDF Author: Rebecca L. Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313080224
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 691

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Book Description
A comprehensive guide to multicultural literature for children, this valuable resource features more than 1,600 titles—including fiction, folktales, poetry, and song books—that focus on diverse cultural groups. The selected titles, pubished between the 1970s and 1990s are suitable for use with preschoolers through sixth graders and are likely to be found on the shelves of school and public libraries. Topics are timely, with an emphasis on books that reflect the needs and interests of today's children. Each detailed entry includes bibliographic information. Use level is also included, as are cultural designation, subjects, and a summary. The invaluable Subject Access section incorporates use level culture information.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes PDF Author: Charlotte Etinde-Crompton
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1978504152
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Introduce your readers to a stellar talent. There is no question that Langston Hughes was one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance. A true pioneer, Hughes was one of the first poets to draw on the syncopated rhythms of jazz and black urban dialect for his work, and it proved transformative for American poetry. With a looser lyrical style reminiscent of Walt Whitman, Hughes used his art to portraying the experiences, concerns, and consolations of black men and women. As a poet, playwright, and novelist, he was impressively prolific, leaving behind a body of work truly worthy of study and celebration.