Novels of the Harlem Renaissance

Amritjit Singh is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Rhode Island College. He is author of The Magic Circle of Henry James (1989) and The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations (1989).

• Contents1. "WHEN THE NEGRO WAS IN VOGUE" 1The Harlem Renaissance and Black Americain the Twenties2. RACE AND SEX 41Approaches to Self-Definition3. THE DICTIES AND THE SHINES 71Class in Black America4. "FOOLING OUR WHITE FOLKS" 89Color Caste in American Life5. THE BURDEN OF BLACKNESS 105Color in Afro-America and BeyondEpilogue 129A Review of Previous Research and Criticism 135Notes 139Bibliography 153Index 165

“[Singh] gives us a sober, sensitive, and well-digested analysis of twelve black novelists of the Harlem Renaissance in an attempt to focus on ‘interracial issues of self-definition, class, caste, and color in the work these writers.’ The twelve writers discussed are Bontemps, Cullen, DuBois, Redmon Fauset, Fisher, Hughes, Larsen, McKay, Schuyler, Thurman, Toomer, and White. It can be said that not all of these writers are of the first rank, nor do they exhaust the complex history of the Renaissance they represent. But the strength of Singh’s study is in its extensions into the ideological and cultural history of America in the Twenties—a history which is as much on the main highway as the history of the American Jazz Age.”—World Literature Today