Cane: A Norton Critical Edition
English
By (author): Jean Toomer
Backgrounds and Sources collects a wealth of autobiographical writing that illuminates important phases in Jean Toomers intellectual life, including a central chapter from The Wayward and the Seeking and Toomers essay on teaching the philosophy of Russian psychologist and mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff, Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work. The volume also reprints thirty of Toomers letters from 191930, the height of his literary career, to correspondents including Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Claude McKay, Horace Liveright, Georgia OKeeffe, and James Weldon Johnson.
An unusually rich Criticism section demonstrates deep and abiding interest in Cane. Five contemporary reviewsincluding those by Robert Littell and W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Lockesuggest its initial reception. From the wealth of scholarly commentary on Cane, the editors have chosen twenty-one major interpretations spanning eight decades including those by Langston Hughes, Robert Bone, Darwin T. Turner, Charles T. Davis, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Barbara Foley, Mark Whalan, and Nellie Y. McKay.
A Chronology, new to the Second Edition, and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included. See more