Quicksand and Passing: Two Harlem Renaissance Novels - Softcover

Larsen, Nella

9781627556187: Quicksand and Passing: Two Harlem Renaissance Novels

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1627556184 ISBN 13: 9781627556187

Publisher: Sublime Books, 2014

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Quicksand and Passing collects both novels by Nella Larsen, one of the most important fiction writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Though Larsen was not prolific, her work was powerful, critically acclaimed, and enduringly significant. In Quicksand, Larsen draws on autobiographical elements to examine a woman’s search for sexual fulfilment, personal freedom, social acceptance, and respectability within a world shaped by race, class, gender, and religious expectation. The novel is deeply pessimistic, following a protagonist whose longing for a fuller life leads her into circumstances increasingly at odds with everything she had hoped to become.

Passing confronts the dangerous realities of racial passing through the story of Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, two childhood friends who are both light-skinned enough to pass as white and who reconnect after many years apart. Clare has chosen to cross the colour line and live within white society, while Irene has embraced her racial heritage and become a respected member of Harlem’s Black community. Their renewed relationship exposes questions of identity, loyalty, desire, class, performance, and concealment, building toward a conclusion in which social appearances and private truths can no longer be kept safely apart.

Together, Quicksand and Passing show Larsen’s extraordinary ability to write about the pressures beneath respectable surfaces. Her novels examine how people pass on many different levels and in many different ways: racially, socially, sexually, emotionally, and morally. Some forms of passing are tolerated, even rewarded, while others carry the possibility of ruin. This single-volume edition brings together two essential works of Harlem Renaissance fiction, African American literature, women’s literature, and twentieth-century American modernism.

About the Author

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was an American novelist, nurse, and librarian whose fiction became central to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Chicago, Larsen wrote with unusual precision about race, mixed-race identity, gender, class, marriage, sexuality, respectability, and social performance in early twentieth-century America. Her first novel, Quicksand, appeared in 1928, followed by Passing in 1929. Although her published fiction was limited to these two novels and a small number of shorter works, Larsen’s reputation has grown steadily, and she is now recognised as an essential voice in African American literature, Harlem Renaissance studies, women’s literature, and American modernist fiction.

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Review

?Quicksand and Passing are novels that I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating and indispensable.? Alice Walker ?Quicksand does not just explore the contradictory terrain of women and romance; its sexual politics tear apart the very fabric of the romance form.? Hazel Carby