Download or read book The Letters of Jean Toomer 1919 1924 written by Jean Toomer and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book The American Play written by Marc Robinson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant study, Marc Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has--and has not--changed and offers close readings of plays by O'Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and many others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theater to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art. The author is particularly attentive to the continuities in American drama, and expertly teases out recurring themes, such as the significance of visuality. He avoids neatly categorizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays and depicts a theater more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before. Robinson proves both a fascinating and thought-provoking critic and a spirited guide to the history of American drama.

Download or read book Modernist Writings and Religio scientific Discourse written by L. Vetter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as electromagnetism and sexuality, dance, and theories of spiritual evolution.

Download or read book Reading Jean Toomer s Cane written by Gerry Carlin and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2014-03-29 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1920 1930 written by Ichiro Takayoshi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 examines the dynamic interactions between social and literary fields during the so-called Jazz Age. It situates the era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature throughout the twentieth century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluate an astonishingly diverse group of authors. Expansive in scope and daring in its mixture of eclectic methods, this book extends the most exciting advances made in the last several decades in the fields of modernist studies, ethnic literatures, African-American literature, gender studies, transnational studies, and the history of the book. It examines how the world of literature intersected with other arts, such as cinema, jazz, and theater, and explores the print culture in transition, with a focus on new publishing houses, trends in advertising, readership, and obscenity laws.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance written by George Hutchinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance (1918–1937) was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. Its key figures include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. The movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. With chapters by a wide range of well-known scholars, this 2007 Companion is an authoritative and engaging guide to the movement. It first discusses the historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, both national and international; then presents original discussions of a wide array of authors and texts; and finally treats the reputation of the movement in later years. Giving full play to the disagreements and differences that energized the renaissance, this Companion presents a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field.

Download or read book A History of the Harlem Renaissance written by Rachel Farebrother and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.

Download or read book Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth Century African American Writing written by Tania Friedel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-21 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The United States of the United Races written by Greg Carter and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This provocative, ambitious, and important book rewrites U.S. history, placing foundational leaders, unheralded prophets, insurgent social movements, pivotal judicial decisions, and central cultural values within an unfolding story of ongoing appeals to interracial mixing as a positive good. Deeply researched, deftly argued, and impressively able to move beyond the two categories of black and white, The United States of the United Races makes the mixed race movements of the recent past resonate with their many antecedents, showing the complex ways in which an emphasis on mixture has both deployed and destabilized racial categories.” —David Roediger, co-author of The Production of Difference Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America. Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America. Greg Carter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Download or read book Nella Larsen s Letters 1917 1935 written by Nella Larsen and published by EMIL. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 is the first comprehensive collection of Nella Larsen’s letters. The continued interest on the part of readers, scholars, and publishers in Larsen’s life and works amounts to a veritable Larsen revival. While biographers and literary critics have referred to her correspondence, Larsen’s letters have until now been accessible mostly through archival research. Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 will make Larsen’s correspondence more easily and broadly available to scholars, students, and general readers. The volume collects letters to Dorothy Peterson, Carl Van Vechten, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Edward Wasserman, Gertrude Stein, Charles S. Johnson, Robert Russa Moton, and George E. Haynes, and many letters are here published in their entirety for the first time. Larsen’s references to contemporary events, national organizations, writers, artists, and other prominent figures create a very lively sense of the intellectual and social context of the Harlem Renaissance and of Larsen’s active involvement in it. Larsen’s letters provide glimpses of the society of which she was a part through anecdotes by turns charming, amusing, irreverent, at times self-effacing, and witty. Larsen’s letters point to her wide-ranging readings. They shed light into her relationship with the art of fiction, into her novels Quicksand and Passing, as well as into her personality, her marriage, and her relationships with friends and other artists. Nella Larsen’s Letters, 1917-1935 is an indispensable companion to her fiction that will enable readers ranging from the general public to scholars and educators to gain a deeper understanding of both the woman and the timeless beauty of her art.

Download or read book Artificial Color written by Catherine Keyser and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how modern US writers used the changing geographies, regimens, and technologies of modern food to reimagine racial classification and to question its relationship to the mutable body. By challenging a cultural ideal of purity, this literature proposes that racial whiteness is perhaps the most artificial color of them all.

Download or read book Brother Mine written by Jean Toomer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane. While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves. Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

Download or read book The Logic of Slavery written by Tim Armstrong and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American history and throughout the Western world, the subjugation perpetuated by slavery has created a unique 'culture of slavery'. That culture exists as a metaphorical, artistic and literary tradition attached to the enslaved - human beings whose lives are 'owed' to another, who are used as instruments by another and who must endure suffering in silence. Tim Armstrong explores the metaphorical legacy of slavery in American culture by investigating debt, technology and pain in African-American literature and a range of other writings and artworks. Armstrong's careful analysis reveals how notions of the slave as a debtor lie hidden in our accounts of the commodified self and how writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison grapple with the pervasive view that slaves are akin to machines.

Download or read book Chicago Renaissance written by Liesl Olson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of Chicago’s innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement. Author Liesl Olson traces Chicago’s cultural development from the 1893 World’s Fair through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of sweeping aesthetic transformations all over the world. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olson’s enthralling study bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic “renaissance” moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville. Stories of the famous and iconoclastic are interwoven with accounts of lesser-known yet influential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. Olson argues for the importance of Chicago’s editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens who helped nurture Chicago’s unique culture of artistic experimentation. Cover art by Lincoln Schatz

Download or read book Writing the Harlem Renaissance written by Emily Allen Williams and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-04-26 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors in this study examine the historical Harlem community during its renaissance period as well as its present-day community. A cursory investigation of the existent that focus on the Harlem community during its renaissance of the early twentieth century reveals that the compilations are primarily ones that present the subjects’ life stories through the lens of praise songs. This book, however, presents the Harlem community through a lens that reveals more grounded and researched analyses that bring the influences and contributions of the Harlem Renaissance to a level of relevance in the twenty-first century from one or more critical vantage points. This study aims to move beyond the more obvious and foregrounded artistic contributions towards analyses of the Harlem Renaissance alongside analyses of a twenty-first century Harlem community and its present day contributions.

Download or read book Modernist Experiments in Genre Media and Transatlantic Print Culture written by Jennifer Julia Sorensen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the material forms and circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed, Jennifer Sorensen shows how authors and publishers conceptualized the material text as an object, as a body, and as an ontological problem. She examines works by Henry James, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, showing that they understood acts of reading as materially mediated encounters. Sorensen draws on recent textual theory, media theory, archival materials, and paratexts such as advertisements, illustrations, book designs, drafts, diaries, dust jackets, notes, and frontispieces, to demonstrate how these writers radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. Placing the literary text at the center of inquiry while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what counts as that, Sorensen shows that modernist generic and formal experimentation was deeply engaged with specific print histories that generated competitive media ecologies of competition and hybridization.

Download or read book Literary Ambition and the African American Novel written by Michael Nowlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.