Though There Be Giants. The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Black Migration Novels

The African American Great Migration novel emerged as a popular mode of fiction in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the decade that saw both the Harlem Renaissance as well as the thunderous onset of the Jazz Age also provided the backdrop for Black migrant stories of personal triumph and transformation set in the symbolically potent urban landscape of America’s iconic cityscapes. While these novels represented the powerful symbol of the Northern city as a proverbial Promised Land, they also reflected the urban pastoral conflict that defined the Black migrant experience. These novels marshaled a variant of the urban pastoral mode that historian Michael Denning has termed the “ghetto pastoral.” In Though There Be Giants: The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Black Migration Novels, Donald M. Shaffer advances Denning’s concept of the ghetto pastoral to examine the ideological tension between rural and urban modes of experience in these novels. Through close readings of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Walter White’s Flight, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Shaffer demonstrates…

Издательство

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Год

2026

Страниц

124

Язык

английский

ISBN

9781496855992