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Cane: A Norton Critical Edition

English

By (author): Jean Toomer

Originally published in 1923, Jean Toomers Cane remains an innovative literary workpart drama, party poetry, part fiction. This revised Norton Critical Edition builds upon the First Edition (1988), which was edited by the late Darwin T. Turner, a pioneering scholar in the field of African American studies. The Second Edition begins with the editors introduction, a major work of scholarship that places Toomer within the context of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. The introduction provides groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer and examines his complex, contradictory racial position as well as his own pioneering views on race. Illustrative materials include government documents containing contradictory information on Toomers race, several photographs of Toomer, and a map of Sparta, Georgiathe inspiration for the first and third parts of Cane. The edition reprints the 1923 foreword to Cane by Toomers friend Waldo Frank, which helped introduce Toomer to a small but influential readership. Revised and expanded explanatory annotations are also included.

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
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Product Details
  • Weight: 545g
  • Dimensions: 132 x 213mm
  • Publication Date: 03 Jan 2011
  • Publisher: WW Norton & Co
  • Publication City/Country: United States
  • Language: English
  • ISBN13: 9780393931686

About Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer (18941967) was born in Washington D.C. the son of educated blacks of Creole stock. Literature was his first love and he regularly contributed avant garde poetry and short stories to such magazines as Dial Broom Secession Double Dealer and Little Review. After a literary apprenticeship in New York Toomer taught school in rural Georgia. His experiences there led to the writing of Cane. Rudolph P. Byrd (Ph.D. Yale University) is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and the Department of African American Studies and the founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. He is the author and editor of ten books including Jean Toomers Years with Gurdjieff; Essentials by Jean Toomer with Charles Johnson; Charles Johnsons Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest; The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson; and with Alice Walker The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. Among Professor Byrds awards and fellowships are an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Harvard University; Visiting Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center; and the Thomas Jefferson Award from Emory University. He is a founding officer of the Alice Walker Literary Society. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History 15132008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words Signs and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer producer and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwomans Narrative by Hannah Crafts as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.

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