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

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The sonnet tradition is rich with change. It is a genre forged in strict conventions: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a volta (or even multiple turns), and themes of praise and unrequited love. Because of these rules, sonneteers from Petrarch to Shakespeare, Donne to Rosetti, and Hopkins to Hughes have used this form and bent it to their own personal uses. The sonnet has an intense social, cultural, and political history. This paper analyzes how Claude Mckay both used the conventions of the sonnet tradition and broke from the sonnet tradition in the poems “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” …

Belonging To Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’S Story In Slang, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

This essay examines Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942) to analyze how the reading experience of the story captures relational dynamics in the community of Harlem. Written in the “Harlemese,” a distinctive lexicon developed in the 1920s, the story seemingly serves as a dictionary with an attached glossary and illustrations of the vernacular words. Reading the story, however, not so much allows the readers to join the linguistic community as requires them to be conscious of the border-crossing movements. Such a structure is intertwined with the character’s theatrical life as a male prostitute, whose way of belonging to …

Passing Down: Nella Larsen's Questioning Of Eugenic Ideology, Sky R. Mcleod

Anthós

This article looks at Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing and examines how eugenic ideology of the time period are explored and critiqued through the story and characters. The novel follows two light skinned black women who grew up together and are reunited as adults. This reconciliation takes place under the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance where the expectations of New Negro womanhood mix with a growing wave of eugenic thought and practices. In the 1920’s many influential thinkers, including black leaders such as W. E.B. Du Bois, were convinced that the only way to move the human race forward was …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Retelling The Classics: The Harlem Renaissance, Biblical Stories, And Black Peoplehood, Mina Magalhaes

Celebration of Learning

Applying social identity theory to the process of creating peoplehood can illustrate the positive power that literature has in uplifting marginalized communities by showing their worth. James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, both composed during the Harlem Renaissance, offer one way to create Black peoplehood by creating depictions of God’s love for His Black people through the repurposing of biblical stories. Through the implementation of social identity theory to Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Johnson’s “The Creation,” I argue that these two authors addressed the need among African Americans to …

Acknowledging The "Forgotten" Contributions Of Black Female Authors: A Review Of _Women Of The Harlem Renaissance_ By Cheryl Wall, Emily M. Allmond

The Corinthian

This review critiques Cheryl Wall's book, Women of the Harlem Renaissance. In this book, Wall addresses the contributions black female authors and artists made to the Harlem Renaissance. The life stories of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston are examined and analyzed by Wall to show the obstacles these female authors faced, and the ways in which the subject matter of their works was affected by their circumstances and cultural upbringing. For many years, these contributions were largely overlooked by both critics and popular culture. Wall's narrative illuminates the significance of these contributions, provides some context for …

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …

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 and Creative Writing 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 …

"Ain't You Heard"?: The Jazz Poetry Of Langston Hughes, Kristin Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

It all began with a piano bench. At the age of four, I sat next to my first piano teacher, as she told me the names of the keys. 'This is C, D, E . . . ," she said, her finger touching each key. moving through the entirety of a C-major scale. Afterward she asked, "Now. which one is F?" Though I touched the incorrect key, A instead of F, I remember being fascinated by the realization that I could create music by depressing those keys, making little wooden hammers strike strings in the piano's hidden belly. That fascination …

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 …

Georgia Douglas Johnson: The Voice Of Oppression, Stephanie Marie Martin-Liggins

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

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.

Philosophic Trend Of American Negro Poetry, George Stevens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, submitted to Xavier University in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Master of Arts degree in 1939, traces the philosophic trend in American Negro poetry from 1761 to the contemporary period, examining the shift from an idealistic, religiously grounded poetic sensibility toward a naturalistic worldview. Drawing on primary poetry collections, anthologies, and critical studies of Black American literature, the thesis divides its analysis into three literary-historical periods: the Early Period (1761-1865), the Pre-Renaissance Period (1866-1899), and the Renaissance Period (1900 to the time of writing).

The thesis argues that poetry of the Early Period, beginning with Jupiter Hammon, …