Nella Larsen's Passing was originally published in 1929, and is a chilling, chilly account of the politics of race, class and gender. Larsen was an African American, seeing with a rather steely eye into some of the uncomfortable accommodations which might be made in order to best gain the riches and rewards which America offered the educated and wealthy - at least, those who were white - or.
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Passing, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Passing, Black Identity, and Race In Passing, Nella Larsen presents black characters who “pass” as white to varying degrees, moving back and forth between different outward identities as it suits them.
Reviewing the critical reception and scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing, the chapter documents the historical and contemporary appeal of the “passing plot” in US fiction, along with the social phenomenon of race passing. Like the slave narrative, the passing novel is structured by border crossings and functions as a form of social critique. And while, like many modernist texts.
Passing was written during the Harlem Renaissance, a period spanning the 1920s during which black literature, intellectual thought, music, and art flourished. During this effervescent decade, writers and thinkers like Nella Larsen, poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neal Hurston, and activists Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois mingled in Harlem, New York, creating art and engaging in social.
Passing Summary and Study Guide SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature. This 33-page guide for “Passing” by Nella Larsen includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 4 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis.
Nella Larsen (1891-1964) Contributing Editor: Deborah E. McDowell Classroom Issues and Strategies. As students become rightly more attuned to representations of gender, race, and class in literary and cultural texts, the subtleties of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing create interesting problems. Such problems derive from the general tendency of readers to elevate one social category of.