Cane: A Norton Critical Edition Second Edition

"Jean Toomer's Cane signaled a breakthrough in prose and poetical writing. It set a high standard for writers coming after him. I am delighted that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd revised the edition, and I congratulate Norton for publishing it. This book should be on all readers' and writers' desks and in their minds."---Maya Angelou"This is an outstanding critical edition that illuminates the complex life of Jean Toomer, the creation of Cane, his haunting, influential masterpiece, and modernism. Once again, we are indebted to Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jt. for their superb scholarship."---Charles Johnson"In this skillfully edited and comprehensive volume, Toomer's multivalent, elliptical modernism finds full expression. Recognizing the author's fascination with fragmentation and hybridity, this edition of Cane gives teacher and student more complete access, biographically and critically, to Toomer's mind and art than anything else of its kind available."---William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates have given us the definitive critical edition of Jean Toomer's masterwork, Cane. Their introduction, a model of literary history, provides a thorough discussion of the author's biography as well as an in-depth discussion of the cultural and historical contexts that gave birth to the novel. As such, it introduces as not only to the text itself but also to the supporting documents gathered here. Autobiographical essays, correspondence, and an assortment of critical, literary, and scholarly essays all afford readers a wealth of material that furthers our understanding and appreciation of this text. With this volume, a literary gem has finally found the magnificent setting it deserves."---Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University."The introduction is excellently researched and complements the included materials well. The selection of contemporary reviews and landmarks of later reception is outstanding."---Werner Sollors, Harvard University"At last, a new Norton Critical Edition of Cane, and a vast improvement over what has been available. Professors Byrd and Gates's Introduction expertly situates the book in relation to the diverse strands of American modernism as well as Toomer's life and thought. With a generous, up-to-date, and well-chosen selection of ancillary readings, both primary and secondary, this edition of a modernist classic will be welcomed far and wide."---George Hutchinson, Indiana University
A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions, Cane is now available in a revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition.
Originally published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane remains an innovative literary work-part drama, party poetry, part fiction. This revised Norton Critical Edition builds upon the First Edition (1988), which was edited by the late Darwin T. Turner, a pioneering scholar in the field of African American studies. The Second Edition begins with the editors' introduction, a major work of scholarship that places Toomer within the context of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. The introduction provides groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer and examines his complex, contradictory racial position as well as his own pioneering views on race. Illustrative materials include government documents containing contradictory information on Toomer's race, several photographs of Toomer, and a map of Sparta, Georgia-the inspiration for the first and third parts of Cane. The edition reprints the 1923 foreword to Cane by Toomer's friend Waldo Frank, which helped introduce Toomer to a small but influential readership. Revised and expanded explanatory annotations are also included."Backgrounds and Sources" collects a wealth of autobiographical writing that illuminates important phases in Jean Toomer's intellectual life, including a central chapter from The Wayward and the Seeking and Toomer's essay on teaching the philosophy of Russian psychologist and mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff, "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work." The volume also reprints thirty of Toomer's letters from 1919-30, the height of his literary career, to correspondents including Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Claude McKay, Horace Liveright, Georgia O'Keeffe, and James Weldon Johnson.An unusually rich "Criticism" section demonstrates deep and abiding interest in Cane. Five contemporary reviews-including those by Robert Littell and W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke-suggest its initial reception. From the wealth of scholarly commentary on Cane, the editors have chosen twenty-one major interpretations spanning eight decades including those by Langston Hughes, Robert Bone, Darwin T. Turner, Charles T. Davis, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Barbara Foley, Mark Whalan, and Nellie Y. McKay.A Chronology, new to the Second Edition, and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.