Download or read book Realism in the Novels of the Harlem Renaissance written by Theodore O. Francis and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novelists of the Harlem Renaissance began writing at a point in America's literary history when the romantic tradition was being set aside for the gutsy truth-telling of realist literature. Modern criticism seems to take the flowery, nineteenth century prose found in the works of Chesnutt, Dunbar, Du Bois and others as an indication that they were writing in the romantic style. This is understandable but flawed. Almost all of the stories written during the Renaissance contained references to slavery or to Post Reconstructionist violence. For that reason few stories stemming from this period and written by African-Americans can be said to be "romantic."
Download or read book Rethinking Social Realism written by Stacy I. Morgan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era--far longer than a majority of their white counterparts. Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social realist atmosphere in which certain African American artists and writers were immersed and shows how black social realism served alternately to question the existing order, instill race pride, and build interracial, working-class coalitions. Morgan discusses, among others, such figures as Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff.
Download or read book Deans and Truants written by Gene Andrew Jarrett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.
Download or read book The Emblematic Novel written by Jon Woodson and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emblematic Novel reveals the hidden system of alchemical emblems, Tarot cards, photographs, and paintings that are coded into Carl Van Vechten's novel The Blind Bow-Boy. Chapter Two shows that Van Vechten's esoteric novel was the template for a large number of canonical modernist novels including works by Faulkner, Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Chandler, John O'Hara, Thornton Wilder, Frank Yerby, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Thomas Wolfe, and many others. Chapter Three is a close reading of Nella Larsen's Passing that demonstrates its influence from Van Vechten and traces the system of Tarot cards, alchemical emblems, photographs, and paintings that make sense of its ambiguous surface text. Chapter Four reassigns Men, Marriage, and Me- the template for the modernist memoir- to the authorship of Zora Neale Hurston. Like the Van Vechten novel, Hurston's memoir-novel is written in code and contains a hidden system of esoteric symbols. The Emblematic Novel is an important intervention in the understanding of the modern novel. This reassessment is accomplished through factoring in major implications about a school of modernist writing that has until now remained out of sight. Given the poor understanding of a host of modernist writers, such as Nathaniel West, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Ralph Ellison, the discovery of a linking commonality in the esoteric solves many of the interpretive mysteries surrounding these and other writers. The Emblematic Novel contains a panoply of illustrations that relate to the surface narrative of the texts under discussion. Woodson's argument is grounded in the "conscious discrepancies" in the texts-intentional mistakes-that have remained beneath the notice of the literary scholars who have examined these texts. These intentional mistakes, along with the alchemical code that they point to, are convincingly brought to the surface through a detailed, irrefutable exposition. The Emblematic Novel is a critical tour de force that opens the door to modernism as an evocation of spiritual alchemy.
Download or read book Langston Hughes and Jacob Lawrence written by Harvey Edwards and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Harlem Renaissance Four Novels of the 1930s LOA 218 written by Rafia Zafar and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HARLEM RENAISSANCE: Four Novels of the 1930s traces the flowering of the Renaissance in diverse genres and forms. It opens with Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1931), an elegantly realized coming-of-age tale that follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city. Suffused with childhood memories, it is the poet's only novel. George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, skewers public figures white and black alike in a raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African "conjureman" at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances. Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps's stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson's Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militancy in its exploration of African American history. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book What Was the Harlem Renaissance written by Sherri L. Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book from the #1 New York Times bestselling series, learn how this vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans--the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem's history all the way to its seventeenth-century roots, and explains how the early-twentieth-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance. With 80 fun black-and-white illustrations and an engaging 16-page photo insert, readers will be excited to read this latest addition to Who HQ!
Download or read book Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance written by William L Andrews and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology opens a window on one of the most extraordinary assertions of racial self-conciousness in Western literature.
Download or read book Remembering the Harlem Renaissance written by Cary D. Wintz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1996 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Ebony Rising written by Craig Gable and published by Quarry Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Ebony Rising' is the first comprehensive, gender-balanced collection of short fiction from the greater Harlem Renaissance era (1912-1940).
Download or read book Harlem Renaissance Novels written by Rafia Zafar and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents classic novels from the 1920s and 1930s that offer insight into the cultural dynamics of the Harlem Renaissance era and celebrate the period's diverse literary styles.
Download or read book Novels of the Harlem Renaissance written by Amritjit Singh and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gentleman Jigger written by Richard Bruce Nugent and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gentleman Jigger stands as a landmark novel, celebrated for its candid exploration of Black sexuality set against the dynamic backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. The story follows Stuartt, a defiantly queer artist, who navigates the complexities of racial and sexual identity in a period of profound cultural upheaval. Originating from a distinguished light-skinned Black family in Washington D.C., Stuartt immerses himself into the burgeoning arts scene of Harlem, where he aligns with the "Niggeratti," a group of young, rebellious artists and writers. This collective boldly challenges their elders’ conviction that their creative endeavors should be dedicated solely to the advancement of racial equality. When their rebellion fizzles and they go their separate ways, Stuartt moves downtown to Greenwich Village where, where he fully indulges in his desires, intertwines with underworld figures, and achieves unexpected fame and fortune. It is also a world that, until his Hollywood debut, assumes that he is white. Part fictionalized autobiography, part social satire, Gentleman Jigger opens up a whole new dimension not only of the Harlem Renaissance but also of the racial and sexual politics of the Jazz Age.
Download or read book Black and White Tangled Threads written by Zara Wright and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black and White Tangled Threads (1920) is a novel by African American author Zara Wright. Published at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Wright’s novel earned nationwide praise as a “realistic portrayal of individuals and events [that] lifts one to the heights of earthly ambitions.” Despite this critical success, Wright does not appear to have written more than Black and White Tangled Threads and its sequel, Kenneth, which were published together in 1920. Although recent scholars have made attempts to return her name to its rightful place on the pantheon of pioneering African American writers, mystery still clouds her life and career to this day. Like many of her contemporaries, Wright took interest in the sociopolitical realities of life as a Black or mixed-race person in the early twentieth century. In this novel, she explores the consequences of passing, interracial marriage, and class on the lives of individuals in the United States and Europe. Black and White Tangled Threads is a story of love, family, and faith from a forgotten writer of the Harlem Renaissance. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Zara Wright’s Black White and Tangled Threads is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Download or read book Home to Harlem written by Claude McKay and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel that gives voice to the alienation and frustration of urban blacks during an era when Harlem was in vogue
Download or read book A History of the Modernist Novel written by Gregory Castle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.
Download or read book The Sage in Harlem written by Charles Scruggs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1984. The Sage in Harlem establishes H. L. Mencken as a catalyst for the blossoming of black literary culture in the 1920s and chronicles the intensely productive exchange of ideas between Mencken and two generations of black writers: the Old Guard who pioneered the Harlem Renaissance and the Young Wits who sought to reshape it a decade later. From his readings of unpublished letters and articles from black publications of the time, Charles Scruggs argues that black writers saw usefulness in Mencken's critique of American culture, his advocacy of literary realism, and his satire of America. They understood that realism could free them from the pernicious stereotypes that had hounded past efforts at honest portraiture, and that satire could be the means whereby the white man might be paid back in his own coin. Scruggs contends that the content of Mencken's observations, whether ludicrously narrow or dazzlingly astute, was of secondary importance to the Harlem intellectuals. It was the honesty, precision, and fearlessness of his expression that proved irresistible to a generation of artists desperate to be taken seriously. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to Mencken as an uncompromising—and uncondescending—commentator whose criticisms were informed by deep interest in African American life but guided by the same standards he applied to all literature, whatever its source. The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.
