Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer

摘要: Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with ideas of Young critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions how race, gender, region would be transformed entered an age mass consumerism. Focusing on s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Cane (1923), brings together a way that allows for thorough historical social contextualization is often missing from assessments these two literary talents modernism whole. The book suggests gay subcultures Chicago traumatic events Great War provoked anxieties over future male gender identity, are reflected Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses primitivistic attraction to African communities his ambivalent attitudes toward were embedded changing cultural gendered landscape mechanical production. next examines aimed broaden racial basis nationalism, inspired by same who had influenced Anderson. He rejected ethnographically based model tapping buried cultures ethnic minorities developed mentor, Frank, also parted folk aesthetic endorsed intellectuals Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer' monumental turned discourses physical culture, machine technology, illegitimacy ways conceiving new type manhood refashioned commonplace notions identity. Taken together, discussions provide fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal importance race America, suggest provocative directions scholarship, give insight into some most crucial texts U.S. interracial modernism. senior lecturer literature culture at University Exeter. editor Letters Toomer, 1919-1924, articles have appeared Journal Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Studies Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies. "