{"id":53391,"date":"2017-04-10T16:57:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T16:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53391"},"modified":"2017-04-10T16:57:43","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T16:57:43","slug":"race-manhood-and-modernism-in-america-the-short-story-cycles-of-sherwood-anderson-and-jean-toomer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53391","title":{"rendered":"Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

University of Tennessee Press<\/a>
\n2007-09-30
\n304 pages
\nHardcover ISBN: 978-1572335806<\/p>\n

Mark Whalan<\/strong><\/a>, Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English
\nUniversity of Oregon<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America<\/em> offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson<\/a> (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer<\/a> (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of \u201cYoung American\u201d writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks<\/a>, Paul Rosenfeld<\/a>, and Waldo Frank<\/a>. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.<\/p>\n

Focusing on Anderson\u2019s Winesburg, Ohio<\/em><\/a> (1919), and Toomer\u2019s Cane<\/em><\/a> (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America<\/em> brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago<\/a> and the traumatic events of the Great War<\/a> provoked Anderson\u2019s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio<\/em>. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson\u2019s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.<\/p>\n

The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the \u201cburied cultures\u201d of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the \u201cfolk\u201d aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>. Instead, Toomer\u2019\u2019 monumental Cane<\/em> turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.<\/p>\n

Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to \u201cYoung America,\u201d suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America” offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of \u201cYoung American\u201d writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1196,8,17,20],"tags":[1996,4909,26812,3548],"class_list":["post-53391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-jean-toomer","tag-mark-whalan","tag-sherwood-anderson","tag-university-of-tennessee-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53393,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53391\/revisions\/53393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}