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8 books match the query 'Toomer, Jean'
Brother Mine
The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo FrankEdited by Kathleen Pfeiffer
University of Illinois Press, 2010
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.
Invisible Darkness
Jean Toomer and Nella LarsenCharles R. Larson
University of Iowa Press, 1993
Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.
In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer's troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen's life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.
With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer's connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major i mpact on African American literary studies.
Jean Toomer & Harlem Renaissance
Edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Jean Toomer's novel Cane has been hailed as the harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance and as a model for modernist writing, yet it eludes categorization and its author remains an enigmatic and controversial figure in American literature. The present collection of essays by European and American scholars gives a fresh perspective by using sources made available only in recent years, highlighting Toomer's bold experimentations, as well as his often ambiguous responses to the questions of his time.
Some of the essays achieve this through close readings of the text, leading to new and challenging interpretations of Toomer's transcendence of genres and styles. Others show how the publication of Cane and his later writings placed Toomer at the heart of contemporary ideological and artistic debates: race and identity, the negro writer and the white literary world, primitivism and modernism.
Jean Toomer
Race, Repression, and RevolutionBarbara Foley
University of Illinois Press, 2019
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.
Masculinist Impulses
Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and ModernityNathan Grant
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Grant’s book provides close readings of Jean Toomer (Cane and Natalie Mann) and Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph of the Suwanee, and Their Eyes Were Watching God), for whom the American South was a crucial locus of the African American experience. Toomer and Hurston were virtually alone among the Harlem Renaissance writers of prose who returned to the South for their literary materials. That return, however, allowed their rediscovery of key black masculine values and charted the northern route of those values in the twentieth century to their compromise and destruction.
Grant then moves on to three more recent writers—John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison—who expanded upon and transformed the themes of Toomer and Hurston. Like Toomer and Hurston, these later authors recognized the need for the political union of black men and women in the effort to realize the goals of equity and justice.
Masculinist Impulses discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century black masculinity as both a feature and a casualty of modernism. Scholars and students of African American literature will find Grant’s nuanced and creative readings of these key literary texts invaluable.
Shaping Words to Fit the Soul
The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-ModernismJürgen E. Grandt
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Split-Gut Song
Jean Toomer and the Poetics of ModernityKaren Jackson Ford
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Reclaiming Jean Toomer as a radical innovator of African American modernist poetics.
In Split-Gut Song, Karen Jackson Ford looks at what it means to be African American, free, and creative by analyzing Jean Toomer's main body of work, specifically, his groundbreaking creation Cane. When first published in 1923, this pivotal work of modernism was widely hailed as inaugurating a truly artistic African American literary tradition. Yet Toomer's experiments in literary form are consistently read in terms of political radicalism—protest and uplift—rather than literary radicalism.
Ford contextualizes Toomer's poetry, letters, and essays in the literary culture of his period and, through close readings of the poems, shows how they negotiate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) and traditional African American forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At the heart of Toomer's work is the paradox that poetry is both the saving grace of African American culture and that poetry cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, Ford argues, structures Cane, wherein traditional lyric poetry first flourishes, then falters, then falls silent.
The Toomer that Ford discovers in Split-Gut Song is a complicated, contradictory poet who brings his vexed experience and ideas of racial identity to both conventional lyric and experimental forms. Although Toomer has been labelled a political radical, Ford argues that politics is peripheral in his experimental, stream-of-consciousness work. Rather Toomer exhibits a literary radicalism as he struggles to articulate his perplexed understanding of race and art in 20th-century America.
The Roots of Cane
Jean Toomer and American Magazine ModernismJohn K. Young
University of Iowa Press, 2024
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.