Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

The Boys And The Bees, Lauren Mohler

Student Scholarship – English

In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the pear tree is seen as a symbol of Janie Crawford's sexuality and self-discovery. However, the pear tree can also be used to analyze Hurston's use of flipped gender roles and Freud's theories on physical maturation. Janie takes on the role of the bee, rather than the flower she wishes to be, in order to go through her journey to self-discovery and change Eatonville by sharing what she has learned.

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

Mapping The Terrain Of Black Writing During The Early New Negro Era, A Yęmisi Jimoh

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Mariann Russell: Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery: A Literary Analysis, Grace Farrell

English Faculty Publications

Book Review by Grace Farrell Lee.

Russell, Mariann. Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem gallery: a literary analysis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980.