"A lack of acquiescence": The women writers and uncanonized texts of the Harlem Renaissance.
Item
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Title
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"A lack of acquiescence": The women writers and uncanonized texts of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Identifier
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AAI3127921
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identifier
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3127921
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Creator
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Rudisel, Christine M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: James L. de Jongh
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies | Black Studies
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Abstract
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The period commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance has always elicited debate. The terms Harlem and Renaissance have both been questioned, the period's dates have been contested, the portrayal of African American life by the period's artists has been criticized, and even the actuality of the period has been disputed. Most, however, would not only acknowledge that the Harlem Renaissance existed, but would also define it as a time during which people of African descent produced a remarkable body of racially expressive art and letters. This general comprehension of the Harlem Renaissance has developed despite myriad opinions about the character, influence, successes and failures of the period. But it is an incomplete understanding, made so by considerations of the period that often overlook, mute, or dismiss the work of its women writers.;The women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance wrote despite gender-related biases and societal restrictions, refusing to be defined solely by their performance in the domestic sphere. The "lack of acquiescence" evinced by these women, their pursuit of writing careers coupled with the ideas they chose to advance in many of their texts, not only affected how they were perceived and how their cultural production was received, but also affected how their participation in the Harlem Renaissance would be recorded and recalled. 1.;My dissertation contributes to the developing tradition of Harlem Renaissance studies by considering the period's women writers, both the disregarded and the celebrated, and by recovering their lost texts. I consider what it meant to be an African American woman writer in the 1920s and 1930s, explore the experiences and convictions of these women, and study the ideas they advanced in their texts. I also recover and examine long forgotten short stories by the popular Zora Neale Hurston, the lesser known Dorothy West, and the neglected Blanche Taylor Dickinson and Gertrude ("Toki") Schalk. To date, bibliographies of these women's texts do not list the short stories I have unearthed. Harlem Renaissance scholarship has left such writings untouched for decades, allowing them to languish in the newspapers in which they were originally published. These heretofore unstudied texts, and the new glimpses of the authors these texts allow, not only serve as evidence of the lacunae in Harlem Renaissance studies, but also call attention to the implications of such omissions for the understanding of the period.;1The phrase "a lack of acquiescence" is from Nella Larsen's Quicksand. She uses it to describe Helga Crane, a woman struggling to be self-defining, and autonomous. See Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986) 7.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.