The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

by Edited by George Hutchinson

• ISBN13: 9780521856997
• ISBN10: 052185699X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 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 the best of current wisdom as well as a set of new readings encouraging further exploration of this dynamic field.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. vii
Chronology	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Foundations of the Harlem Renaissance	p. 11
The New Negro as citizen	p. 13
The Renaissance and the Vogue	p. 28
International contexts of the Negro Renaissance	p. 41
Major Authors and Texts	p. 55
Negro drama and the Harlem Renaissance	p. 57
Jean Toomer and the avant-garde	p. 71
"To tell the truth about us": the fictions and non-fictions of Jessie Fauset and Walter White	p. 82
African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry	p. 96
Lyric stars: Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes	p. 112
"Perhaps Buddha is a woman": women's poetry in the Harlem Renaissance	p. 126
Transgressive sexuality and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance	p. 141
Sexual desire, modernity, and modernism in the fiction of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher	p. 155
Banjo meets the Dark Princess: Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the transnational novel of the Harlem Renaissance	p. 170
The Caribbean voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond	p. 184
George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman: two satirists of the Harlem Renaissance	p. 198
Zora Neale Hurston, folk performance, and the "Margarine Negro"	p. 213
The Post-Renaissance	p. 237
"The Aftermath": the reputation of the Harlem Renaissance twenty years later	p. 239
Guide to further reading	p. 254
Index	p. 265
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