by





We're Sorry
Not Available
This item is being sold by an Individual Seller and will not ship from the Online Bookstore's warehouse. The Seller must confirm the order within two business days. If the Seller refuses to sell or fails to confirm within this time frame, then the order is cancelled.
Please be sure to read the Description offered by the Seller.
A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions, Cane is now available in a revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition.
Originally published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane remains an innovative literary work—part drama, party poetry, part fiction. This revised Norton Critical Edition builds upon the First Edition (1988), which was edited by the late eh, a pioneering scholar in the field of African American studies. The Second Edition begins with the editors’ introduction, a major work of scholarship that places Toomer within the context of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. The introduction provides groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer and examines his complex, contradictory racial position as well as his own pioneering views on race. Illustrative materials include government documents containing contradictory information on Toomer’s race, several photographs of Toomer, and a map of Sparta, Georgia—the inspiration for the first and third parts of Cane. The edition reprints the 1923 foreword to Cane by Toomer’s friend Waldo Frank, which helped introduce Toomer to a small but influential readership. Revised and expanded explanatory annotations are also included.
“Backgrounds and Sources” collects a wealth of autobiographical writing that illuminates important phases in Jean Toomer’s intellectual life, including a central chapter from The Wayward and the Seeking and Toomer’s essay on teaching the philosophy of Russian psychologist and mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff, “Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work.” The volume also reprints thirty of Toomer’s letters from 1919–30, the height of his literary career, to correspondents including Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Claude McKay, Horace Liveright, Georgia O’Keeffe, and James Weldon Johnson.
An unusually rich “Criticism” section demonstrates deep and abiding interest in Cane. Five contemporary reviews—including those by Robert Littell and W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke—suggest its initial reception. From the wealth of scholarly commentary on Cane, the editors have chosen twenty-one major interpretations spanning eight decades including those by Langston Hughes, Robert Bone, Darwin T. Turner, Charles T. Davis, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Barbara Foley, Mark Whalan, and Nellie Y. McKay.
A Chronology, new to the Second Edition, and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.
By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. (Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America)
Introduction | |
"Song of the Son": The Emergence and Passing of Jean Toomer | |
Jean Toomer's Racial Self-Identification: A Note on the Supporting Materials | |
*Draft Registration, June 5, 1917 | |
*1930 Census | |
*Detail of 1930 Census | |
*1931 Marriage Certificate | |
*Draft Registration, April 24, 1942 | |
The Text of Cane | |
Foreword to the 1923 Edition of Cane | |
Map of Sparta, Georgia | |
Backgrounds and Sources | |
Background Texts | |
The Cane Years | |
* Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work | |
Correspondence | |
To Alain Locke, November 11, 1919 | |
To Georgia Douglas Johnson, December 1919 | |
To Georgia Douglas Johnson, January 7, 1920 | |
To Georgia Douglas Johnson, February 20, 1920 | |
To Alain Locke, December 24, 1920 | |
To Alain Locke, January 26, 1921 | |
To Alain Locke, November 8, 1921 | |
To Alain Locke, November 1921 | |
To Waldo Frank, March 24, 1922 | |
Waldo Frank to Jean Toomer, April 25, 1922 | |
To Waldo Frank, April 26, 1922 | |
To Waldo Frank, August 21, 1922 | |
To John McClure, July 22, 1922 | |
To Claude McKay, July 23, 1922 | |
To the Editors of The Liberator, August 19, 1922 | |
To Alain Locke, October 1, 1922 | |
To Gorham B. Munson, October 31, 1922 | |
To Sherwood Anderson, December 18, 1922 | |
To Sherwood Anderson, December 29, 1922 | |
To Waldo Frank, December 1922 | |
To Waldo Frank, December 12, 1922 | |
To Alain Locke, January 2, 1923 | |
To Waldo Frank, early January 1923 | |
To Waldo Frank, early to mid January 1923 | |
To Waldo Frank, early January 1923 | |
To Horace Liveright, January 11, 1923 | |
To Horace Liveright, February 27, 1923 | |
To Horace Liveright, March 9, 1923 | |
To Horace Liveright, September 5, 1923 | |
To Countee Cullen, October 1, 1923 | |
To Georgia O'Keeffe, January 13, 1924 | |
To James Weldon Johnson, July 11, 1930 | |
Criticism | |
Contemporary Reviews | |
A Review of Cane | |
A Review of Cane | |
The Younger Literary Movement | |
The Significance of Jean Toomer | |
Jean Toomer | |
Critical Interpretations | |
Jean Toomer | |
Gurdjieff in Harlem | |
[Jean Toomer's Cane] | |
The Failure of a Playwright | |
Introduction to the 1969 Edition of Cane | |
The Search for Black Redemption: Jean Toomer's Cane | |
A Key to the Poems in Cane | |
The Unity of Jean Toomer's Cane | |
Jean Toomer and the South: Region and Race as Elements within a Literary Imagination | |
The Divided Life of Jean Toomer | |
Looking Behind Cane | |
Textuality and Vision in Jean Toomer's Cane | |
Blues Ballad: Jean Toomer's "Karintha" | |
Jean Toomer and the "New Negroes" of Washington | |
Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From "Blue Veins" to Seventh-street Rebels | |
"Dorris Dances . . . John Dreams": Free Indirect Discourse and Female Subjectivity in Cane | |
Jean Toomer's Cane: Modernism and Race in Interwar America | |
Jean Toomer and the Avant-Garde | |
Jean Toomer's Cane: "Mixed-Blood" Impossibilities | |
Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning | |
Jean Toomer, the Artist-An Unfulfilled American Life: An Afterword | |
A Chronology | |
Selected Bibliography | |
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved. |
An electronic version of this book is available through VitalSource.
This book is viewable on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and most smartphones.
By purchasing, you will be able to view this book online, as well as download it, for the chosen number of days.
A downloadable version of this book is available through the eCampus Reader or compatible Adobe readers.
Applications are available on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Windows Mobile platforms.
Please view the compatibility matrix prior to purchase.