Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:01:02.515Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

J. Saunders Redding and the “Surrender” of African American Women's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Melissa Girard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 281 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bérubé, Michael. Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Cornell UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Brawley, Benjamin. The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States. Rev. ed., Duffield, 1921.Google Scholar
Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. U of North Carolina P, 1939.Google Scholar
Brooks, Cleanth, and Warren, Robert Penn. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students. Henry Holt, 1938.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling, et al., editors. The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes. Citadel Press, 1941.Google Scholar
Browning, Robert. Pippa Passes: A Drama. The Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning, edited by Scudder, Horace E., Houghton, Mifflin, 1895, pp. 128–45.Google Scholar
Browning, Robert. “Pippa's Song.” The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, edited by Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Clarendon Press, 1919, p. 856.Google Scholar
Bruce, Dickson D. Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915. Louisiana State UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Cain, William E. “Southerners, Agrarians, and New Critics: The Institutions of Modern Criticism.” The Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 5, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 486–576.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Pergamon Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Indiana UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Cullen, Countée, editor. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. Harper and Row, 1927.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. edited by Braxton, Joanne M., U of Virginia P, 1993.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. “Frontiers of Criticism.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 64, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1956, pp. 525–43.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. edited by Kermode, Frank, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. edited by Schuchard, Ronald, Harvest Books, 1993.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “‘… and Bid Him Sing’: J. Saunders Redding and the Criticism of American Negro Literature.” Introduction. Redding, pp. vii-xxviii.Google Scholar
Girard, Melissa. “Jeweled Bindings: Modernist Women's Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Nelson, Cary, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 96–119.Google Scholar
Graf, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. U of Chicago P, 1987.Google Scholar
Grimké, Angelina Weld. The Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké. edited by Herron, Carolivia, Oxford UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Herron, Carolivia. Introduction. Grimké, pp. 3–22.Google Scholar
Hickman, Miranda B., and McIntyre, John D., editors. Rereading the New Criticism. Ohio State UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Hicks, Granville, et al., editors. Proletarian Literature in the United States. International Publishers, 1935.Google Scholar
Honey, Maureen. Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. 2nd ed., Rutgers UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. edited by Rampersad, Arnold, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Edited by Christopher C. De Santis, vol. 9, U of Missouri P, 2002.Google Scholar
Hull, Gloria. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Tree Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Harvard UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Jackson, Lawrence. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960. Princeton UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Jacques, Geoffrey. A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary. U of Massachusetts P, 2009.Google Scholar
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Barbara. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender Harvard UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Johnson, Charles S., editor. Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea. 1927. Books for Libraries Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon, editor. The Book of American Negro Poetry. Harcourt, Brace, 1922.Google Scholar
Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. Columbia UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Kerlin, Robert T., editor. Negro Poets and Their Poems. Associated Publishers, 1923.Google Scholar
Kuenz, Jane. “Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countée Cullen.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 507–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, Alain, editor. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. 1925. Simon and Schuster, 1997.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. The Works of Alain Locke. edited by Molesworth, Charles, Oxford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Molesworth, Charles. And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen. U of Chicago P, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.Google Scholar
Nielson, Aldon Lynn. Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century. U of Georgia P, 1988.Google Scholar
Powers, Peter. “‘The Singing Man Who Must Be Reckoned With’: Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countée Cullen.” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 4, Winter 2000, pp. 661–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, editor. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. Clarendon Press, 1919.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. U of North Carolina P, 1991.Google Scholar
Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism as Pure Speculation.” 1941. Literary Opinion in America, edited by Zabel, Morton D., Harper and Brothers, 1951, pp. 639–54.Google Scholar
Ransom, John Crowe. The World's Body. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.Google Scholar
Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. 1939. Cornell UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Reimonenq, Alden. “Countée Cullen's Uranian ‘Soul Windows.‘” Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Nelson, Emmanuel S., Harrington Park Press, 1993, pp. 143–65.Google Scholar
Riede, David G. “Genre and Poetic Authority in Pippa Passes.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 27, nos. 3–4, Autumn-Winter 1989, pp. 49–64.Google Scholar
Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton UP, 2012.Google Scholar
“Rondeau.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Greene, Roland et al., 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 1225–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. U of Iowa P, 2011.Google Scholar
Smethurst, James Edward. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. U of North Carolina P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smethurst, James Edward. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946. Oxford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917. U of New Hampshire P, 2005.Google Scholar
Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. U of North Carolina P, 2002.Google Scholar
Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. U of North Carolina P, 1987.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” 1937. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, edited by Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Jarrett, Gene Andrew, Princeton UP, 2007, pp. 268-74.Google Scholar