African American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940: Volume 10

Description

The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.

Eve Dunbar is Professor of English at Vassar College (NY). She is the author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (2012). Ayesha K. Hardison is an associate Professor at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (2014) which won the Nancy Dasher Award and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.