Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance

Jean Toomer's novel Cane has been hailed as the harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance and as a model for modernist writing, yet it eludes categorization and its author remains an enigmatic and controversial figure in American literature. The present collection of essays by European and American scholars gives a fresh perspective by using sources made available only in recent years, highlighting Toomer's bold experimentations, as well as his often ambiguous responses to the questions of his time.

Some of the essays achieve this through close readings of the text, leading to new and challenging interpretations of Toomer's transcendence of genres and styles. Others show how the publication of Cane and his later writings placed Toomer at the heart of contemporary ideological and artistic debates: race and identity, the negro writer and the white literary world, primitivism and modernism.

GENEVIÈVE FABRE is a professor at the University Denis Diderot in Paris, where she is director of the Center of African American Research. She has published widely on African American and Hispanic literature, including her book Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphors.

MICHEL FEITH is associate professor at the University of Nantes, France, and has published on Asian, Hispanic, and African American literatures.