Toni Morrison's Jazz: Historical Fiction in Relation to Nonfictional Accounts of the Harlem Renaissance

Toni Morrison's Jazz: Historical Fiction in Relation to Nonfictional Accounts of the Harlem Renaissance

Author: Florian König

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 3640462068

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http: //www.uni-jena.de/, course: African America in the Historical Novel, language: English, abstract: "...who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". This statement by the Swedish Academy seems an appropriate description of Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Her novel Jazz, which was first published in 1992, is set in the Harlem of the 1920s and re-creates an "essential aspect" of African-American history - the Harlem Renaissance. [...] In this project on the subject of 'African America in the Historical Novel', I want to examine Morrison's fictional representation of the afrorementioned era in relation to nonfictional depictions provided by significant writers of this epoch who explored the implications of jazz (and the development of African-American culture) during the actual historical period in which Morrison's novel is set. Therefore, her own narrative approach to history will be compared to the views Harlem Renaissance contemporaries such as Alain Locke and F. Scott Fitzgerald articulated in their assessments of this particular epoch of (African-) American experience. Selected parts of the Survey Graphic's issue Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro edited by Alain Locke and foundation for his groundbreaking anthology The New Negro as well as Fitzgerald's notable essay Echoes of the Jazz Age2 will be taken into consideration when evaluating Morrison's historical reconstruction of how the Harlem Renaissance, or how Fitzgerald calls it, the "Jazz Age", shaped and expressed African-American identity.


Toni Morrison's Jazz: Historical Fiction in Relation to Nonfictional Accounts of the Harlem Renaissance

Toni Morrison's Jazz: Historical Fiction in Relation to Nonfictional Accounts of the Harlem Renaissance

Author: Florian König

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2009-11-05

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13: 3640464915

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/, course: African America in the Historical Novel, language: English, abstract: ”...who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”. This statement by the Swedish Academy seems an appropriate description of Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Her novel Jazz, which was first published in 1992, is set in the Harlem of the 1920s and re-creates an "essential aspect" of African-American history - the Harlem Renaissance. [...] In this project on the subject of 'African America in the Historical Novel', I want to examine Morrison's fictional representation of the afrorementioned era in relation to nonfictional depictions provided by significant writers of this epoch who explored the implications of jazz (and the development of African-American culture) during the actual historical period in which Morrison's novel is set. Therefore, her own narrative approach to history will be compared to the views Harlem Renaissance contemporaries such as Alain Locke and F. Scott Fitzgerald articulated in their assessments of this particular epoch of (African-) American experience. Selected parts of the Survey Graphic's issue Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro edited by Alain Locke and foundation for his groundbreaking anthology The New Negro as well as Fitzgerald's notable essay Echoes of the Jazz Age2 will be taken into consideration when evaluating Morrison's historical reconstruction of how the Harlem Renaissance, or how Fitzgerald calls it, the "Jazz Age", shaped and expressed African-American identity.


The Harlem Book of the Dead

The Harlem Book of the Dead

Author: James Van Der Zee

Publisher: Morgan & Morgan, Incorporated

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

James Van Der Zee was an African-American photographer who specialized in funerals. This book includes many of his photographs, with his comments. The text, by Camille Billops, is primarily an interview with the artist at the age of 91. Includes poetry, by Owen Dodson, inspired by some of the photos.


The Crisis

The Crisis

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1992-10

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. For nearly 100 years, The Crisis has been the magazine of opinion and thought leaders, decision makers, peacemakers and justice seekers. It has chronicled, informed, educated, entertained and, in many instances, set the economic, political and social agenda for our nation and its multi-ethnic citizens.


America Is Not the Heart

America Is Not the Heart

Author: Elaine Castillo

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0735222436

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and The New York Public Library "A saga rich with origin myths, national and personal . . . Castillo is part of a younger generation of American writers instilling literature with a layered sense of identity." --Vogue How many lives fit in a lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America--haunted by the political upheaval in the Philippines and disowned by her parents--she's already on her third. Her uncle gives her a fresh start in the Bay Area, and he doesn't ask about her past. His younger wife knows enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. But their daughter--the first American-born daughter in the family--can't resist asking Hero about her damaged hands. An increasingly relevant story told with startling lucidity, humor, and an uncanny ear for the intimacies and shorthand of family ritual, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family struggling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history. With exuberance, grit, and sly tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance; a narrative of two nations and the people who leave one home to grasp at another.


Please, Louise

Please, Louise

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 1416983384

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.


First Book Of Jazz

First Book Of Jazz

Author: Langston Hughes

Publisher: Ecco

Published: 1995-10-21

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 9780880014243

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An introduction to jazz music by one of our finest writers. Langston Hughes, celebrated poet and longtime jazz enthusiast, wrote The First Book of Jazz as a homage to the music that inspired him. The roll of African drums, the dancing quadrilles of old New Orleans, the work songs of the river ports, the field shanties of the cotton plantations, the spirituals, the blues, the off-beats of ragtime -- in a history as exciting as jazz rhythms, Hughes describes how each of these played a part in the extraordinary history of jazz.


Black Orpheus

Black Orpheus

Author: Saadi A. Simawe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-05-03

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1135579822

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women’s studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.


Jazz

Jazz

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-07-24

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307388107

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review


Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr

Publisher: Civitas Books

Published: 2010-08-24

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0465022634

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline's roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors -- tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.