Kirjahaku

During the 20s and 30s, an extraordinary confluence of black talent expressed itself in the literary and cultural phenomenon that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. In a radical assertion of racial self-consciousness and a celebration of ethnic identity which was echoed across the nation, black writers and intellectuals came together with the intent of redefining the vision of America through artistic endeavor. The texts and authors which have long been recognized as exemplary of the Harlem Renaissance - Toomer, Hurston, Larsen, Hughes - have inspired increasingly widespread historical and literary studies of the era, but until now there has been no definitive volume rendering them accessible to the mainstream American classroom. The anthology, which contains three novellas and four Short stories, offers lucid biographical headnotes about each of the authors included. Bill Andrews' fluid and insightful introduction provides a full historical context for a study of the Harlem Renaissance, inquiring into its motives and its follies, its ambitions and its failures; and he traces its resonances to the present day. Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance offers every prospect of becoming the flagship textbook for studies of the period.

Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist and public Reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last 12 years of his life he toured Britain and America giving 2-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it seemed to many that a whole society had broken up rather than that a solitary recitalist had concluded. This book tries to recreate, in greater detail than hitherto, the sense of how those readings were performed and how they were received, how Dickens devised his stage set and tailored his books to make them into performance scripts, how he conducted his reading tours all around the country and developed a quite extraordinary rapport with his listeners. No single study of this late career of Dickens has drawn to such an extent on contemporary witnesses to the readings as well as tried to assess in some depth the significance of what Dickens called 'this new expression of the meaning of my books'. 'I shall tear myself to pieces', he said as he waited eagerly to go on stage for his performance, and that is ironically what he did, in ways he perhaps had not quite intended: he fractured into dozens of different characters up there on the platform, and as he thus tore himself to pieces his health collapsed irretrievably under the pressures he put upon himself to achieve these masterly illusions.