Tag: Langston Hughes

  • On “Mulatto” Modern American Poetry Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson From Langston Hughes (Twayne, 1967) James A. Emanuel This dramatic dialogue offers a tensely individualized conflict between father and son that is hardened by the vigor and scorn of the words and broadened by carefully placed, suggestive details from nature. The…

  • A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions, “Cane” is now available in a revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition.

  • “A Little Yellow Bastard Boy”: Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes’s “Mulatto” Robert Paul Lamb, Professor of English Purdue University College Literature Volume, 35, Number 2 (Spring 2008) pages 126-153 DOI: 10.1353/lit.2008.0012 When Langston Hughes published “Mulatto” in his second poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the…

  • A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a…

  • Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby” Atlantic Studies Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006) pages 97 – 110 DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499 Isabel Soto This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de…

  • Passing W. W. Norton & Company September 2007 584 pages 5.2 × 8.4 in Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9 Nella Larsen Edited by Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature Northeastern University Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature. Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by…

  • Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were…