Passing - Nella Larsen

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Résumé :
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....

Sommaire:
Nella Larsen was an American novelist, nurse, librarian, and one of the major literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Born Nellallitea Walker in Chicago, she drew on her own complex experiences of race, class, gender, education, and social belonging in fiction of unusual psychological subtlety. Larsen worked as a nurse and later as a librarian before becoming part of the literary and intellectual culture associated with Harlem in the 1920s, where Black writers, artists, editors, critics, and publishers helped reshape American literature.Larsen published two novels, Quicksand and Passing, both of which are now central works of African American modernism and Harlem Renaissance literature. Her fiction is known for its spare style, emotional restraint, social precision, and acute treatment of mixed-race identity, female interior life, respectability, sexuality, alienation, and the pressures placed upon Black women navigating white-dominated institutions and Black middle-class expectations. Though her published literary career was brief, her work has had a lasting influence on studies of race, gender, modernism, and American fiction.After leaving the literary world, Larsen returned to nursing, and for many years her reputation was quieter than that of some of her contemporaries. Later twentieth-century scholarship restored her to a central place in American literary history. Today, Nella Larsen is widely read alongside writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and other Harlem Renaissance figures, and Passing remains one of the most discussed American novels of racial identity, social performance, and psychological ambiguity....