Reading Jean Toomer's 'Cane'


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.




Poets for Young Adults


Book Description

Spanning the time of colonial America through the present day, Poets for Young Adults examines the lives and works of seventy-five poets that are read and loved by teens. Readers will discover an eclectic mix of poets and their styles, from the modern songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Tupac Shakur, to the nineteen sixties icons Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath, to such traditional poets as Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake. Poets from all multicultural backgrounds are included, many of whom wrote about the immigration and/or protest experiences, from Colonial through contemporary times. Over half of the poets are women, and more than one third are women of color. Poets include: -Maya Angelou -Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua -Anne Bradstreet -Lewis Carroll -E.E. Cummings -Emily Dickinson -Bob Dylan -Ralph Waldo Emerson -Paul Fleischman -Robert Frost -Nikki Giovanni -Langston Hughes -Paul Janesczko -Myra Cohn Livingston -Ogden Nash -Naomi Shihab Nye -Joyce Carol Oates -Lydia Omolola Okutoro -Gary Soto -Phillis Wheatley -Ray Anthony Young Bear




Literature in the First Media Age


Book Description

The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they began to fill up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars.




Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination


Book Description

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.




The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.




The Roots of Cane


Book Description

The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations. Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.




Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture


Book Description

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.




Aphrodite's Daughters


Book Description

The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment. Aphrodite’s Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké’s invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery’s frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett’s risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence. The product of extensive archival research, Aphrodite’s Daughters draws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery’s published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.




Spoofing the Modern


Book Description

An examination of satirical texts from the first major African American literary movement Spoofing the Modern is the first book devoted solely to studying the role satire played in the movement known as the "New Negro," or Harlem, Renaissance from 1919 to 1940. As the first era in which African American writers and artists enjoyed frequent access to and publicity from major New York-based presses, the Harlem Renaissance helped the talents, concerns, and criticisms of African Americans to reach a wider audience in the 1920s and 1930s. These writers and artists joined a growing chorus of modernity that frequently resonated in the caustic timbre of biting satire and parody. The Harlem Renaissance was simultaneously the first major African American literary movement of the twentieth century and the first major blooming of satire by African Americans. Such authors as folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Langston Hughes, journalist George S. Schuyler, writer-editor-poet Wallace Thurman, physician Rudolph Fisher, and artist Richard Bruce Nugent found satire an attractive means to criticize not only American racism, but also the trials of American culture careening toward modernity. Frequently, they directed their satiric barbs toward each other, lampooning the painful processes through which African American artists struggled with modernity, often defined by fads and superficial understandings of culture. Dickson-Carr argues that these satirists provided the Harlem Renaissance with much of its most incisive cultural criticism. The book opens by analyzing the historical, political, and cultural circumstances that allowed for the "New Negro" in general and African American satire in particular to flourish in the 1920s. Each subsequent chapter then introduces the major satirists within the larger movement by placing each author's career in a broader cultural context, including those authors who shared similar views. Spoofing the Modern concludes with an overview that demonstrates how Harlem Renaissance authors influenced later cultural and literary movements.




Jean Toomer


Book Description

The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post–World War One radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. In Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution, Barbara Foley explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, she recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. Foley's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, she traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, she argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private.