ENG 232: American Literature Survey

In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes's autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, she shows that translating and being translated are as vital to Hughes's own poetics as they are to understanding literary modernism.

In this innovative study, R. Baxter Miller explores Hughes's life and art to enlarge our appreciation of his contribution to American letters. Arguing that readers often miss the complexity of Hughes's work because of its seeming accessibility, Miller begins with a discussion of the writer's auto-biography, an important yet hitherto neglected key to his imagination. This is one of the first studies to apply recent methods of literary analysis to the work of a Black American writer.

Jason Miller investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture. Starting from Hughes's life as a teenager during the Red Summer of 1919 and moving through the civil rights movement, Miller initiates an important dialogue between America's neglected history of lynching and some of the world's most significant poems.

Which Sin To Bear? explores Hughes's efforts to negotiate the problems of identity and ethics he faced as an African American professional writer and intellectual. The book traces his early efforts to fashion himself as an "authentic" black poet of the Harlem Renaissance and his later imagining of a new and more inclusive understanding of authentic blackness. It examines Hughes's lasting, yet self-critical commitment to progressive politics in the mid-century years.

In this volume, Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics to produce an interdisciplinary approach to the important historical and cultural elements reflected in the variety of genres in which Hughes worked. Through the lenses of creative writers, musicians, social activists and critics, this collection explores the ways that Hughes transformed American literature and society. Contributors to this volume place Hughes in the context of Harlem, his preferred geographical and spiritual home base.

Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes shows that Hughes's approach to the main philosophical currents of the Cold War era was original, dynamic, and systematic in ways that most scholars have yet to appreciate. Jonathan Scott has written the first book-length study to analyze the extraordinary range of Hughes's creative output, showing that his unassailable reputation as one of America's finest "folk poets" barely scratches the surface of his oeuvre.