Funded Projects Query Form
One match

I propose to complete a book manuscript on the African-American poet Langston Hughes. The book will show how, with regard to various aesthetic problems and ethical dilemmas that confronted him, Hughes strove to navigate between extremes that threatened his art, his integrity, and his unique public status as the literary voice of ordinary African Americans. My project thus lies at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Chapters address Hughes's ambivalent mastery of political compromise; his interventions in the shifting definition of "authentic blackness"; his engagement with the popular primitivism of the 1920s; and his effort to satisfy together the sometimes-conflicting demands of poetry and folk art.