This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

Kathy Glass’s “Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance” highlights social networks, textual politics, and Black resistance and focuses on African Americans’ sustained literary activism against myriad social evils after the Civil War. The chapter begins to map the politics of uplift, temperance, and social reform, with emphasis on work by Julia C. Collins, Harper, and William Wells Brown. Glass suggests these texts underscore literature’s potential for political work by inspiring readers and encouraging collective resistance against oppression.

This chapter studies the literary representation of dancers, particularly child dancers, in Harlem Renaissance fiction, arguing that this focus can help explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, and urban life. Attending to representations of children provides a fresh perspective from which to examine the significance of dance both in relation to questions of cultural identity (including black modernists’ engagement with the legacies of minstrelsy) and the emotional cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance. Against the backdrop of a broader preoccupation with black childhood among social scientists, educators, and political activists, representations of child dancers were freighted with contradictory emotions that complicated discourses of racial uplift. This chapter engages with a range of texts, including Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” and Dorothy West’s “An Unimportant man,” to argue that dancing children sometimes embody new possibilities for the future and resistant aesthetics that defy categorization, but they make for anxious, loaded imagery that flickers between embarrassment and pride, pleasure and unease.

This chapter explores the variety of literature available to young people during the Harlem Renaissance, paying specific attention to the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Effie Lee Newsome, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. Children’s literature took shape through periodicals, community theatre, black-owned publications, and mainstream publishing houses with an interracial audience. Texts embraced a new vision of African American childhood as sophisticated, capable, knowledgeable, and courageous, because literacy rates for young people often outmatched those of adults, children were imagined through texts as cultural leaders who would help reinvent the black community. Writers also employed children’s literature as a site of community galvanization, drawing together adults and children through the veneration of black history and identity. Children were imagined as politically invested and deeply aware of the racist culture that surrounded them. Children’s literature aimed to develop readers’ racial sensibility in order to propel social change.