Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Vicious Modernism
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2012
Print publication year:
1990
Online ISBN:
9780511898037
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511898037
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies
Information

Book description

Harlem, a quintessentially black city in the midst of a great modern metropolis, has piqued the imagination of writers and artists since the turn of the century. Its subsequent history as a legendary cultural centre and a notorious ghetto only intensified its mystique and inspired large numbers of writers, among them Sherwood Anderson, Federico Garcia Lorca, Fannie Hurst, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Tom Wolfe. In Vicious Modernism, James de Jongh traces the evolution of the imaginative usage of Harlem by literary artists over the past seventy years. The book concentrates on the aesthetic and cultural force of the idea of Harlem, and de Jongh identifies three distinct phases in its evolution within the literary imagination: its promise as a cultural capital in the 1920s; the failure of that promise and the emergence of a ghetto in the 40s; and finally, following the race riots of the early 1960s, a shared vision of Harlem as cultural capital and contemporary slum.

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.