...Sally E. Parry © 2015 Duke University Press 2015 14  Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s Sally E. Parry The Harlem Renaissance continues to attract much scholarly attention, including its influence on writers of the black diaspora. Harlem stands as an imaginary with social...

... ering timely commentary on some truly fascinating topics, three books address various aspects of African American literature such as the African colonization movement, the theme of the Black avenger, and the role of African Americans in the development of American print culture. American Literary...

... about a young black woman who runs from blackness toward a deaden- ing, transcendent whiteness. It also may have been a story about a young black woman who runs toward and finds revelation in blackness. Yet the play’s very wandering, the endless shape-shifting of characters and story, resists...

... with American nationality, the kind of work attempted in a different way by, say, Walter Benn Michaels. Thus in Modernist Nation he sees the Harlem Renaissance in the context of nativism, but a nativism less inclined to represent a black nationalist project and more inclined to read black identity...

... by Caroline s refusal to be a mother to eight-year-old Noah. Caroline gives to us nothing of herself. We cannot appropriate her or the emotions she attempts to keep at bay. Instead, Caroline/Caroline reorients the a ects and imagery associated with Blackness and Black female subjectivity, staging an anger...

... literature used “domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people.” Noting that much of the period’s children’s literature used animals in comparison with enslaved black people, Fielder notes how publications of this sort present “a more progressive model of sympa- thy...

... him to Dreiser’s work. As Hakutani shows, Wright’s Black Boy and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy share many similarities, including their origins in court cases, their protagonists’ victimization by society, and a Bakhtinian “microcosm of heteroglossia” as narrative technique. Richard Lehan...

... of Peterkin’s literary and private worlds. Peterkin’s real-life con- cerns included the responsibilities of her position as a white plantation mistress, her craving for fame, and the ways in which her writing was acceptable to the public only when she concentrated on black characters. Although her black...

...Sanford E. Marovitz Duke University Press 2010 14  Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s Sanford E. Marovitz As in 2007, the two authors who attract the most critical attention this year are Gertrude Stein and W. E. B. Du Bois. With the increasing attention given to black studies...

..., Religious and Moral) but also as the beginning of a stylistically innovative through line, grounded in anonymous or pos- sibly collective authorship and non-Western modes of expression and musicality, which links these early compositions to some of the most radical contemporary Black poetry and thought...

... of which is the name Melanctha. Instead of the usual interpretation of Melanctha as ‘‘black earth Rowe finds its source in the name of Philipp Melancthon, a 16th-century humanist linked to German educational reform. Melancthon’s combining of religion and humanism anticipates Melanctha’s...

.... McKay’s Harlem, especially in Home to Harlem, is a racial underworld, and “rather than disavowing black underworld primitivism altogether, McKay resignifies it as a targeted protest against the injustices that stymie life and pleasure in Harlem.” Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose...

... black university. Renker’s analysis places women instructors at the forefront of the movement to incorporate the teaching of American literature in the postsecondary curriculum. She notes that in all three cases such courses in American literature began to appear at roughly the same time...

..., the historical topic shown to be inextricably tied to the ongo- ing legacy of slavery as well as to the persistence of gender imbalance within the Black community. Queer theory, often in conjunction with other disciplinary endeavors such as the study of minority literatures or of popular icons (celebrity studies...

... power structures.” Her subversion of sex roles is conveyed through what is not written, and in employing this method she was a more modernist author than critics have suggested. Gertrude Atherton is represented by a new edition of her best-known novel, Black Oxen (Broadview), edited...

... approach to authors too often consigned solely either to formalist readings, in Anderson’s case, or to readings examining Toomer’s representations of racial identities that are, in J. Martin Favor’s terms, “neither white nor black yet both.” Reading one of the neglected stories from Winesburg...

...- mopolitan communities, and communities across new media. ree essays in particular are germane to this chapter. Jeremy Braddock s e Scandal of a Black Ulysses: Wallace urman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the Harlem Reception of Joyce (pp. ), a reworked essay that rst appeared in ELH two years ago (see...

... Douglass’s ‘‘autobiographies and his one work of fiction, ‘The Heroic Slave,’ cautiously resist indiscriminate sympathy even while acknowledging the political e≈cacy of compassion On the flip side of sympathy, Linda M. Grasso’s The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature...

... in All-Asian-American Dramas’’ ( 53: 389– 409) and Mike Sell’s Ed] Bullins as Editorial Performer: Textual Power and the Limits of Performance in the Black Arts Movement’’ ( 53: 411–28). Pao focuses on the politics of casting and the heated debates involved in contemporary productions...

... an understanding of the ‘‘power of blackness’’ that Melville ascribed to Hawthorne; and a Jungian view of human psychology. Two Donna M. Campbell 273 other essays address London’s last published novel, The Little Lady of the Big House. Asserting that ‘‘Jack London’s career...