Nella Larsen

While the contributions of women were sometimes overlooked in the past, modern critics have worked to recognize the importance of their work.

Authors like Nella Larsen and Jesse Fawcett have received renewed attention for their literary achievements.

The singer, Ma Rainey, was known for her specific style of dress and her lyrics that reflected her personal life, which was considered a significant departure for the time.

She was also the first to bring blues music into the world of vaudeville.

Raphael is a leading scholar of American and African American literature, specializing in theories and histories of the novel as well as gender and sexuality studies.

He's the editor of, uh, new editions of not one but two novels that I count among my personal favorites, namely Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Nella Larsen's Passing.

So I think we have very similar tastes.

Um, Raphael's work on Nella Larsen in particular is in my view among the very best scholarship of this essential Harlem Renaissance author and that's really saying something since Larsen studies is truly a feast for literary scholars and readers.

I regularly assign Raphael's brilliant essay Nella Larsen Reconsidered in my undergraduate classes at Cardiff University and it never fails to transform my students' understanding of Larsen's work in the context of shifting norms and discourses of gender, race and class in the early twentieth century United States.

So I was very excited to read Raphael's first monograph published last year by the University of Chicago Press and delighted when he agreed to come and chat with me about it for the New Books Network.

The book is titled Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire and the Modern American Novel.

Mm.

That you are encouraged to in- to engage mediums like i- I read, um, "Mumbo Jumbo" by Ishmael Reed, and I spent some time reading George Schuyler's "Black No More." And, um, then I went and read Nella Larsen's "Passing" to write the introduction to my paper on Garvey and the UNIA for a history class.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I think I wrote Read Passing in school.

Passing by Nella Larsen.

Got it.

That came out in 1929.

Um, she was very protective with offering me Walter White as an example.

She, before I read Nella Larsen's Passing, she wanted me to read Jean Toomer.

Um, and her message then when I was young, and there's gonna be a little bit of a contradiction here because our relationship, you know, it, it changes and sort of things change, but, um, she knew I wanted to be a writer.

She knew I wanted to be an artist.