Literature: The Literature of the Harlem Renaissance - An Introduction

In this course, we will be considering one of the most exciting and powerful movements in American artistic life: the Harlem Renaissance. This was a period of intense creativity around the period 1919-1939, in which Black artists sought to give voice to their identity, and create fully authentic representations of themselves. We will be reflecting on portrayals of defiance and protest, from Alice Dunbar Nelson’s early poem I Sit and Sew and Walter F. White’s novel The Fire in the Flint. The great thinkers and theorists of the Harlem Renaissance will be examined: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and George Schuyler. We will be discussing drama from playwrights Georgia Douglas Johnson and Eulalie Spence, and extracts from Zora Neale Hurston’s great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The tutor, Clare Jackson, recently gave a Members’ Lecture on ‘The Literature of the Harlem Renaissance’ which generated enthusiastic requests for a further course. She is delighted by the prospect of sharing and exchanging ideas with you. Anyone with any interest in literature is warmly welcome to come along and find out more about this radically creative, searching and influential movement. The Harlem Renaissance’s reach is global. We will be finding out how it started, and grew.