Sign-In
Cart
Passing: A Harlem Renaissance Classic of Race, Identity, and Social Performance
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9781604599947
Publisher: Wilder Publications
Published: Feb 25 2010
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Passing is Nella Larsen's powerful Harlem Renaissance novel of race, identity, class, marriage, and social performance in early twentieth-century America. The story centres on Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned Black women whose lives have taken sharply different paths. Irene lives within the Black middle class of Harlem, while Clare has crossed the colour line and lives as white, concealing her racial identity from her racist husband and the society around her. Their renewed acquaintance becomes increasingly charged with fascination, resentment, danger, and ambiguity, as Larsen examines the unstable boundaries between safety and desire, belonging and concealment, freedom and self-erasure.
With remarkable compression and psychological precision, Passing explores the pressures created by racism, respectability, gender expectation, social status, and the need to survive inside a hostile racial order. Larsen's novel is both a major work of African American literature and one of the essential texts of the Harlem Renaissance, notable for its restrained style, moral complexity, and unresolved emotional force. For readers of American literary classics, Black women writers, modernist fiction, Harlem Renaissance literature, and novels of racial identity and social constraint, Passing remains a brief but extraordinarily powerful work.
33 different editions
Also available
Passing: A Harlem Renaissance Classic of Race, Identity, and Social Performance
Larsen, Nella
Hardcover
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Paperback