A History of the Harlem Renaissance
Published on 7. August 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
452 pages
978-1-108-73744-9 (ISBN)
Description
The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms - from the roman a clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations - this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
Reviews / Votes
'Highly recommended.' C. A. Bily, Choice 'this is not your grandfather's Harlem Renaissance ... At every turn and in every way ... A History of the Harlem Renaissance invites and inspires readers to reconceive and reimagine both the nature and the extent of Black modernist cultural production.' Tim Ryan, StyleMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
732 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-73744-9 (9781108737449)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Rachel Farebrother | Miriam Thaggert
A History of the Harlem Renaissance
Book
02/2021
Cambridge University Press
€52.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
Rachel Farebrother is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University. She is the author of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (2009), which was awarded honourable mention in the 2010 British Association of American Studies book prize. Her essays have appeared in Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Modernism/Modernity and various edited collections including Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh's Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, and the Avant-Garde (2013) and Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker's The Oxford Cultural and Critical History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America (2012). Miriam Thaggert is Associate Professor of English, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (2010). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Meridians. Her second book is a social and literary history of African American women and the railroad in American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Content
Introduction: revising a renaissance Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert; Part I. Re-reading the New Negro: 1. Cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the Harlem renaissance Daniel G. Williams; 2. Making the slave anew: poetry, history, and the archive in New Negro renaissance poetry Clare Corbould; 3. The New Negro among White Modernists Kathleen Pfeiffer; 4. The Bildungsroman in the Harlem renaissance Mark Whalan; 5. The visual image in New Negro renaissance print culture Caroline Goeser; Part II. Experimenting with the New Negro: 6. Gwendolyn Brooks: riot after the New Negro Renaissance Sonya Posmentier; 7. Romans a clef of the Harlem renaissance Sinead Moynihan; 8. Modernist biography and the question of manhood: Eslanda Goode Robeson's Paul Robeson, Negro Fionnghuala Sweeney; 9. Modernism and women poets of the Harlem renaissance Maureen Honey; 10. Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance Katharine Capshaw; Part III. Re-mapping the New Negro: 11. London, New York, and the Black Bolshevik renaissance: radical black internationalism during the New Negro renaissance James Smethurst; 12. Island relations, continental visions, and graphic networks Jak Peake; 13. 'Symbols from within': charting the nation's regions in James Weldon Johnson's God's trombones Noelle Morrissette; 14. Rudolph Fisher: renaissance man and Harlem's interpreter Jonathan Munby; Part IV. Performing the New Negro: 15. Zora Neale Hurston's early plays Mariel Rodney; 16. Zora Neale Hurston, film, and ethnography Hannah Durkin; 17. The pulse of Harlem: African-American music and the New Negro revival Andrew Warnes; 18. The figure of the child dancer in Harlem renaissance literature and visual culture Rachel Farebrother; 19. Jazz and the Harlem renaissance Wendy Martin; 20. Alain Locke and the value of the Harlem: from racial axiology to the axiology of race Shane Vogel; Afterword Deborah E. McDowell.