Nella Larsen

Lapsuudenystävät Irene ja Clare ovat taustaltaan afroamerikkalaisia, ihonväriltään vaaleita naisia, joita elämä on vienyt eri suuntiin. Irene elää mustan lääkärimiehensä ja kahden poikansa kanssa mustien yhteisössä New Yorkin Harlemissa, Clare on valinnut elämän valkoisena, eikä hänen rasistinen miehensä tiedä hänen juuristaan. Kun ystävykset vuosien jälkeen kohtaavat, he joutuvat tarkastelemaan elämäänsä, identiteettiään ja valintojaan uusin silmin.Naisten välille syntyy monivivahteinen suhde, jota värittävät salaisuudet, ristiriidat ja keskinäinen vetovoima. Kummankin elämässä avautuu uusi lehti. Tarina päättyy traagisesti, mutta loppu jättää tilaa tulkinnoille. Mitä tapahtui todellisuudessa, mikä oli pelkkää kuvitelmaa? Vaikuttiko joku tapahtumien kulkuun?Romaanin teema on päivänpolttava: mistä identiteetti rakentuu, mikä on etnisen taustan, luokan ja sukupuolen merkitys. Pääseekö juuriaan pakoon?

This Norton Critical Edition includes: Nella Larsen's stunning 1928 novel, accompanied by Carla Kaplan's full and far-reaching introduction and explanatory annotations. Twenty-seven carefully chosen reviews of one of the Harlem Renaissance's most sensational literary debuts as well as contemporary biographical and cultural contexts. Related writings by Nella Larsen repudiating racial stereotypes. Major critical assessments by Laura Doyle, Ann duCille, Lori Harrison-Kahan, Arne Lunde and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Deborah McDowell, Hanna Musiol, Susan M. Reverby, and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. A chronology and a selected bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Irene Redfield is a light-skinned Black woman living in Harlem, NY, with her husband and two sons. After a chance encounter, Irene resumes contact with a childhood friend, Clare Kendry. Though Clare is also Black, she is even more fair-skinned than Irene and passes as a white woman. To the point that she's married a deeply racist white man who has no knowledge of her race. As the two women's lives intertwine with fascination and repulsion, their troubling friendship leads them to examine the choices they've made and face the dangerous consequences.

Irene Redfield is a light-skinned Black woman living in Harlem, New York, with her husband and two sons. After a chance encounter, Irene resumes contact with a childhood friend, Clare Kendry. Though Clare is also Black, she is even more fair-skinned than Irene and passes as a white woman--to the point that she's married to a deeply racist white man who has no knowledge of her race. As the two women's lives intertwine with fascination and repulsion, their troubling friendship leads them to examine the choices they've made and face the dangerous consequences.

The orphan of a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Helga Crane is a young woman caught between cultures and in search of a home. Though her beauty and education open many doors, as a biracial woman in 1920s America, Helga is accepted by neither the Black nor the white communities—instead remaining an object of curiosity and an outsider wherever she goes. Her furious quest for belonging will take her from Chicago to New York to Denmark: a journey rife with autobiographical parallels to Larsen’s own life. With its astonishingly contemporary take on identity and an angry, rebellious heroine, Quicksand is a classic novel ripe for rediscovery.

'The overlooked American writer who blows apart modern thinking on race' TelegraphBorn to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself as a mixed-race woman in the Deep South of 1920’s America. She moves to Harlem and then to Copenhagen in her search for a sense of belonging and acceptance, but wherever she goes, she cannot escape the perceptions and prejudices of others. One of the finest works of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen’s semi-autobiographical first novel is a powerful portrayal of one woman’s fractured inner life.

A classic novel by the author of Passing--part of the Modern Library Torchbearers series, featuring women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance. Born to a white Danish mother and a Black father, and raised largely by her white step-family, Helga Crane has long struggled to find a sense of belonging in the racially segregated American society of the early twentieth century. Quicksand follows her journey teaching at an all-Black school in the South, to her subsequent move to Harlem, and eventually, to Copenhagen, as she attempts to carve out a sense of self that is free from the constraints of category--of being reduced to labels like mother versus wife, White versus Black, American versus Danish. Ultimately, these categories are slippery and unstable, but they are also constantly reinforced upon her, and Helen finds that her own perception of self is constantly negated by the rigidity of how others perceive her. With intriguing autobiographical parallels to Larsen's own life, Quicksand offers an engrossing page-turner about a women's quest to find herself--and investigates whether genuine self-discovery is possible in the first place.

Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group's greatest obstacles), Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing is easily among the most penetrating, skillfully composed explorations of race and gender in the twentieth century. It focuses on two estranged friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who, after years apart, are joltingly thrown back together, their lives transformed radically through one of the most scandalous and intriguing social phenomena of Larsen's time racial passing. Today, Larsen is ranked as one of the leading novelists of her generation; this novel, her masterpiece, demonstrates why.

Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers around the reunion of two childhood friends--Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield--and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The story is told as a third person narrative from the perspective of Irene Redfield, a black woman with a European appearance, who receives an invitation to meet her old friend Claire. Clare's husband John (Jack) is not aware of her black ancestry as she attempt to pass as white for him. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", and is a key element of the novel and a catalyst for the events that followed.

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

A Contemporary Classics hardcover omnibus of the complete fiction of one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including her most famous novel, Passing Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the Black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen's best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a vibrant sense of place. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.