Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism
Highlights
1. These decades constitute an extraordinary moment in the development of African American writing.
2. This conventional narrative of the period which has tended to focus on literary luminaries who publishes legendary books - both critically acclaimed and commercially successful.
3. The works printed here would vaguely suit these loose descriptors at least in some measure, but we deploy “realism, naturalism, modernism” here as conveniences, points of analytical departure, demanding fuller interrogation.
4. The cataclysm of World War II comes to mark for some historians the front end milestone of this period. The second wave of the Great Migration was, in part, a response to the realities of war.
5. African American literary production from the 1940s to the 1960s is emphatically northern, urban and set mainly in the black American culture capitals: Chicago, Boston and Harlem.
6. In these cities, a black urban street culture, the product of roiling social tensions, transformed a so-called cultural (read white) mainstream.
7. At least in strictly literary terms, Wright’s novel christened the 1940s decade. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Native Son made Wright the 1st African American writer to receive both critical acclaim and commercial success.
8. The elevation of protest to a category of aesthetic value far outlived the decade of the 1940s; this category came to be applied retrospectively to writers as diverse as William Attaway, Chester Himes, Frank Yerby, and Ann Petry.
9. While many writers found the conventions of socialist realism compatible with their own literary objectives and philosophies, others began to reassess the merits of urban realism. It so happens that such reassessments coincided with a burgeoning vision of integration as a social ideal.
10. Invisible man reflected what Ellison termed a more “experimental attitude”, which combined a commitment to “social responsibility” with a studied attention to the art and craft of fiction and the more technical rigors of narrative.
11. Ellison’s account of his literary genealogy thus partly contributed to the now critical commonplace that, with Invisible Man, African American writers came to grips with the aims and prerogatives of modernism.
12. The Wright-Baldwin-Ellison strifes and the controversies surrounding the paradigm of protest writing have provided the fodder for one of the most resilient narratives of African American literary history of 1940-1960 stretch.
13. As many have observes, however, this narrative ignores many equally important aspects of African American literature.
14. Literary historical overviews of the period can seem to perpetuate a male-centered narrative, which marginalizes women.
15. Poetry published between 1940 and 1960 defies the categories and complicates the debates provoked by this period’s narrative forms.
16. The works of Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as that of her most esteemed contemporaries - Margaret Walker, Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden challenge - challenge the bearded debates about social protest.
17. Writing in an era when American poetry was highly intellectualized and academic, Brook’s studied attention to form and technical craftsmanship links her with Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden.
18. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun began the longest run on Broadway of any drama written by a black American up to that time. It has become something of a cliché to suggest that Raisin in the Sun was to African American drama what Native Son was to African American fiction.
19. The establishment of the American Negro Theater (ANT) in 1940 was a milestone in African American History.
20. Black writers emerging in the waning days of the 1950s, served notice that yet another era in black letters was struggling to be born. The apocalypse they heralded was indeed the realization of the Old Testament prophecy, which James Baldwin summoned when he titling his volume essays The Fire Net Time.
Literature I Would Like to Read
- the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks
- Sorrow Home by Margaret Walker