Nella Larsen’s issues with being biracial reflected clearly throughout her novel Quicksand. “Passing for What?: Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels.” Black American Literature Forum 20.1/2 (1986): 97–111.Dana Monreal on “Nella Larsen’s Continuous Battle with Race” “Properties and Real Estate.” The Messenger May 1924. Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen. “The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut.” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Joan Shelley Rubin, Lisa Botshon, and Meredith Goldsmith.

“Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Consumer Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen.” Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Smith Furniture of the Better Kind.” The Messenger Jul. “An Exquisite Town House.” Harper’s Bazaar Jan. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004.ĭavis, Thadious M. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007.Ĭheng, Anne Anlin. Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.īrown, Bill.

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Considering Quicksand in the context of these publications, specifically fashion magazines and publications produced by and for black readers in this period, affords us a unique opportunity to explore connections between mass visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance novel in the late 1920s. It is through these publications that we can read Larsen’s main character, Helga Crane. Magazine culture of the 1920s and 1930s shows a similar emphasis on place: though removed from the horrors of slavery, these publications operated with the principle that where one lives defines one’s socio-economic position. There is an emphasis not only on gender as a defining characteristic that inscribes the fate of the “old man” and “ma” but, by clarifying where they live, Hughes demonstrates who these people are without having to literally express their race. In this poem, the reader knows the race of the “old man” and “ma” based on where the “old man” and “ma” live, in a “fine big house” and a “shack” respectively.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen