Book contents
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Chapter 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 7 Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 8 Modernist Biography and the Question of Manhood: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s Paul Robeson, Negro
- Chapter 9 Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 10 Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
from Part II - Experimenting with the New Negro
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2021
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- A History of the Harlem Renaissance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Revising a Renaissance
- Part I Re-reading the New Negro
- Part II Experimenting with the New Negro
- Chapter 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: Riot after the New Negro Renaissance
- Chapter 7 Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 8 Modernist Biography and the Question of Manhood: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s Paul Robeson, Negro
- Chapter 9 Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
- Chapter 10 Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
- Part III Re-mapping the New Negro
- Part IV Performing the New Negro
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores some of the recent scholarship on Harlem Renaissance women poets to assess whether limiting and gendered critical frameworks of the past are expanding enough to bring them into the fold of Modernist Studies. It curates some of the most significant scholarship to appear since the widespread development of new critical models in Harlem Renaissance and African American feminist literary criticism. It also presents a case study of three poets, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery, whose work models for us the modernism of New Negro women’s lyrical verse, a genre routinely omitted from the modernist canon. It argues that the erotic lyric or erotically charged pastoral verse largely defined for New Negro women poets what it meant to be a modern writer, as well as an artist-activist, and that we should consider the best of such poems part of the modernist canon.
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- A History of the Harlem Renaissance , pp. 159 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021