The Cambridge Edition of Tender Is the Night declares that it “chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.” Likewise, Penguin describes the book as “the account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and [their] lifestyle.” This chapter challenges the androcentric, victim-blaming nature of these long-accepted readings and argues that we have not paid sufficient attention to the sexual violence that permeates Fitzgerald’s novel. More specifically, it explores the conceptual, contextual, and formal ways that the book creates sympathy for Dick Diver, and then it asks readers to consider how our understanding of the text might change if we shift our attention to Nicole, whose adolescent violation is both the inciting event of the novel and occupies its center, literally and figuratively. Taking into consideration Fitzgerald’s literary aspirations alongside the novel’s formal complexity, the chapter argues that Tender Is the Night shares some of the modernist qualities of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as well as their intensifying anxieties over female sexuality and concludes that by tending to Nicole’s trauma, Tender is as much a novel of recovery and redemption as one of dissipation and decline.

World Literature now knows itself as a corpus of peripatetic cultural texts held together by protocols “of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 4–5), but some accounts of modern literary history in World Literature anthologies impoverish, rather than enrich, students’ understanding of Africa and the worldliness of African cultural texts. To change this, it is necessary to recalibrate the relationship between Africa and World Literature. Rethinking modern literary history, particularly literary modernism, is one way of doing so. Literary modernism was a global, rather than a regional, phenomenon. Globalizing its classics in World Literature anthologies would, therefore, encourage students to read them historically. In practice, this means reading African and Western modernism contrapuntally. Resisting the urge to subsume African cultural texts in pre-established generic categories is another way of doing so. That Son-Jara, Gilgamesh, and The Iliad are epics should not preclude acknowledging that how each produces epicality differs. Admitting that translation cannot overcome all obstacles to mutual intelligibility across languages is an additional way. Some words, some concepts, are simply untranslatable. Such recalibrations open World Literature up to the recognition that Africa and its cultural texts affirmatively intervene in, rather than merely augment, cultural texts of the West.

Using God’s Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson’s major collection of poetry from the New Negro Renaissance, this chapter outlines the author’s view of the tension between American popular culture and vernacular African American expressive forms, presenting his theory of poetic expression and linguistic transcription through call and response and the author’s close relationship to this work. Johnson viewed popular culture ambivalently, as a necessary yet potentially reductive force. In its greatest potential, it could form a people’s poetry, and in so doing create a distinctly racial art that was also national. God’s Trombones was therefore more than a simple linguistic project, it was an endeavor to draw upon “symbols from within” African American folk and vernacular forms, and also from within the nation’s regions, to advance a national African American culture.

This chapter focuses on the career of Jean Toomer. It looks first at Toomer’s Washington upbringing among the black bourgeoisie, his course of reading in modern literature and the attraction for Toomer of the Greenwich Village literary world he associated with an “aristocracy of culture.” It then examines the way Toomer, following the advice of his friend Waldo Frank, capitalized on his African American identity and experience in the South in writing his first book Cane, which he retrospectively thought of as his “passport” into the literary world. The chapter goes on to demonstrate the extent to which Cane became a burden for Toomer, as it came to define him as a “Negro writer” despite the more ambitious, post-racial works he was writing, none of which could get published. It focuses finally on the reasons why African American anthologists and critics needed to claim Cane for African American literature – in good part, the chapter argues, because it showcased the race’s capacity for modernist experimentation. And it deals finally with Toomer’s reluctant agreement to be anthologized as an African American writer, as this ensured that his writing would endure.

The chapter focuses on the way Ralph Ellison established his literary reputation first by aligning himself with the modernizing step forward representing by Richard Wright, whom he identified as black America’s equivalent to James Joyce, then by self-consciously surpassing Wright with Invisible Man. It touches upon the complex, seven-year gestation of Invisible Man, mainly to reveal the extent to which the novel got increasingly tailored and steamlined for commercial success. It looks at the way the critical reception of Invisible Man neatly fit Ellison’s ambitions for the novel, making him the first African American novelist to be routinely compared to the great European modernists and classic nineteeth-century American novelists. Finally it takes on the question of why Ellison never finished his second novel, situating his struggle in relation to the discourse of “the death of the novel” so prominent in high literary circles in the 1950s. Despite his lifelong attacks on this notion, the chapter argues, Ellison was haunted by it, and condemned by his success as the first “great” African American novelists to aim at nothing short of some synthesis of “the great American novel” and Joyce’s novel-ending Finnegans Wake. It ends with an ironic recognition of the posthumous state of Three Days Before the Shooting as more a book for academics than for the broad American public for whom Ellison thought the novel so essential.

Introduces the argument about the literary ambition motivating landmark African American novelists from Charles Chesnutt to Ralph Ellison, and essential to the creation of a world-class African American literature. Introduces the general argument that these African American novelists based their hopes for literary success on the fundamentally enabling assumption of African American “literary destitution.” Assuming that the first “great” African American writer was yet to come, each writer aligned his or her individualistic ambition with the collective project of building an African American literature. In practice this led to later generations of writers making “sacrificial precursors” of those who had achieved but short-term, relative success in the past, and who came to seem dated or overly conventional in response to the growing prestige of international literary modernism that added a pressure to be “modern” to the pressure to be “literary.” The introduction challenges notions of an internally developing African American literary canon by insisting on the extent to which African American literature developed internationally and comparatively, through the work of writers who inescapably measured literary success in terms of the modernist literature being canonized within the literary field they struggled to win prominent positions in.

This chapter examines Richard Wright’s career in terms of the gap between his aspiration to emulate the great, canonized modernists like Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein and his practical recourse to the realist and naturalist novel as still the best means of representing African American experience. It examines as well the gap between his authorial image as an uncompromising black author telling harsh truths and the unprecedented popularity of his novels thanks in good part to compromises he made with his publishers in the interest of securing publication by the Book of the Month Club. Wright’s landmark stature, this chapter demonstrates, stems in good part from his remarkable commercial success, success that ultimately made it possible for him to follow in the footsteps of his American modernist precursors and write as an expatriate in Paris. The chapter deals largely with the expressed desire of the phenomenally successful author of Native Son and Black Boy, well-tutored in what he called “the writing game” by his agent Paul Reynolds and his editor Edward Aswell, to move beyond the expectations attached to the “Negro writer” he had become. It aligns his exile with his desire to write major multi-volume works outlined in private journals and letters, as well as produce the literary equivalent of the non-figurative art whose virtues he describes at some length in the major novel of his French period, The Outsider.

This chapter examines the criticism and fiction of Wallace Thurman, who aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance in 1926 and became one of its harshest critics. It analyzes the contradictory nature of that ambition as expressed in his unpublished autobiographical essay “Notes on a Stepchild.” The chapter goes on to situate Thurman’s efforts to create an avant-garde wing of Harlem writers, which culminated in the creation of the journal Fire!, in the context of 1926 debates about the nature of African American literature represented by the Crisis symposium and by landmark essays by W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and George Schuyler. It also explains his notoriously negative criticism of African American literature in terms of his aim of steering it away from literary parochialism and toward international modernism. Thurman embraced a mode of literary decadence, the chapter finally argues, as a means of repudiating the realist race problem novel and putting African American literature on the same track that led to a full-fledged modernism, but he recognized the futility of this in his novel Infants of the Spring, which is analyzed here as the story of two failed African American writers. The chapter ends by recognizing the irony inherent in Thurman’s devotion to Jean Toomer, which implies that the great African American writing he was calling for was already written.

This chapter focuses on three stages in the career of James Weldon Johnson. It deals first with Johnson’s expressed ambition to be the first great African American poet at the moment when he had just written “Fifty Years” and was set to publish The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. When Johnson’s hopes for a national literary reputation were disappointed, he then turned to the promotional, critical, theoretical, and editorial work that laid important groundwork for the Harlem Renaissance, which would help establish conditions for the quantitative production of African American writing from which great individual work, and more modern, experimental work, would emerge. The chapter argues for Johnson’s understanding of the extent to which a people’s literary output is inescapably measured in an international context, an understanding he grasped as a result of his familiarity with Latin American modernismo, even as he seemed unfamiliar with the expatriate American modernist agenda of Ezra Pound. During the 1920s and at the high point of the Harlem Renaissance he helped launch and promote, Johnson was able to capitalize on the arrival of a substantial body of African American writing to reissue his nearly forgotten novel as a “classic of Negro literature” and publish his major poetic effort, God’s Trombones.