Jean Toomer & Harlem Renaissance
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.
MICHEL FEITH is associate professor at the University of Nantes, France, and has published on Asian, Hispanic, and African American literatures.
Jean Toomer's Cane: modernism and race in interwar America / Werner Sollors
Identity in motion: placing Cane / George Hutchinson
The poetics of passing in Jean Toomer's Cane / Charles-Yves Grandjeat
"The waters of my heart": myth and belonging in Jean Toomer's Cane / Françoise Clary
Feeding the soul with words: preaching and dreaming in Cane / Cécile Coquet
"Karintha": a textual analysis / Monica Michlin
Dramatic and musical structures in "Harvest song" and "Kabnis": Toomer's Cane and the Harlem Renaissance / Geneviève Fabre
Black modernism? the early poetry of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay / Wolfgang Karrer
Race and the visual arts in the works of Jean Toomer and Georgia O'Keeffe / Martha Jane Nadell
Jean Toomer and Horace Liveright; or, a new Negro gets "into the swing of it" / Michael Soto
Building the new race: Jean Toomer's eugenic aesthetic / Diana I. Williams
The reception of Cane in France / Michel Fabre
