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Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936

Rudolph P. Byrd

4/5 ( ratings)

Jean Toomer earned his place in American literary history with Cane , a brilliant modernist collage of fiction, poetry, and drama about black life in rural Georgia and the urban North. Although Toomer continued to write prodigiously, his work went largely unpublished as he turned away from an exploration of his African American roots he had employed so powerfully in Cane. Rudolph P. Byrd examines the central reason behind Toomer's literary decline: his enthusiasm for the theories of George Gurdjieff, a contemporary Russian psychologist, philosopher, and mystic. As Toomer's work degenerated into propaganda for Gurdjieff's theories on human development and spiritual reforms, publishers turned away. Yet, Byrd makes clear that the works Toomer wrote after 1923 do not represent the total break from his earlier concerns that critics have generally assumed. Examining both Cane and the body of writings Toomer produced after it, Byrd finds a distinct thematic unity in the Toomer canon--a consistent, optimistic faith in human possibility and wholeness.

Language: English

Pages: 212

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Release: January 01, 2000

ISBN: 0820312487

ISBN 13: 9780820312484

Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936

Rudolph P. Byrd

4/5 ( ratings)

Jean Toomer earned his place in American literary history with Cane , a brilliant modernist collage of fiction, poetry, and drama about black life in rural Georgia and the urban North. Although Toomer continued to write prodigiously, his work went largely unpublished as he turned away from an exploration of his African American roots he had employed so powerfully in Cane. Rudolph P. Byrd examines the central reason behind Toomer's literary decline: his enthusiasm for the theories of George Gurdjieff, a contemporary Russian psychologist, philosopher, and mystic. As Toomer's work degenerated into propaganda for Gurdjieff's theories on human development and spiritual reforms, publishers turned away. Yet, Byrd makes clear that the works Toomer wrote after 1923 do not represent the total break from his earlier concerns that critics have generally assumed. Examining both Cane and the body of writings Toomer produced after it, Byrd finds a distinct thematic unity in the Toomer canon--a consistent, optimistic faith in human possibility and wholeness.

Language: English

Pages: 212

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Release: January 01, 2000

ISBN: 0820312487

ISBN 13: 9780820312484

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