We’re SO ready for our first TLW Series 4 event!
Please join us on Tuesday 1 October 2019 for the first TLW event of the new session – a talk by the brilliant US-based scholar Professor Susan Tomlinson (University of Massachusetts Boston) on “Jessie Fauset at the Front of Modernism”. Talk starts at 5.15pm, refreshments available from 5pm. Room 202, 4 University Gardens, University of Glasgow. Free. ALL welcome!
France enchanted Jessie Fauset (1882-1961), whose fiction, poetry, and travel writing tracked a personal and intellectual engagement that began during her time as a postgraduate student at the Sorbonne and continued through her career as an author, editor of the Crisis magazine, and architect of the Harlem Renaissance. This talk will trace Fauset’s professional and personal relationship to France as a coming-of-age site, from the function of the First World War in her first novel There Is Confusion (1922), through her foray into Jazz Age Paris in Plum Bun (1928), to the racial violence and despair of 1933 in her final novel, Comedy: American Style. It explores how black American modernists refashioned prevailing constructions of Great War literature, entre-deux-guerres expat culture, and middlebrow transatlanticism. Susan will invite us to consider the contours of cultural enchantment and how it forms transatlantic women writers’ literary sensibility and reforms our own constructions of modernism.
Susan Tomlinson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Her work focuses on late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century US literature, particularly black and middlebrow women writers and the anxieties their work incites among the arbiters of modernism.
The Transatlantic Literary Women Series is generously funded by the British Association for American Studies / United States Embassy Small Grants Programme. Follow us on twitter @atlantlitwomen.
