Literary genealogy and the politics of revision in the American Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance

In the introduction to the 1925 collection The New Negro, Alain Locke inaugurates his anthology as a "changeling," a child secretly switched at birth for another that sits in the laps of its naive readers. Borrowing Locke's changeling as a figure for the uncertainty of literary genealogy, this dissertation examines representations of literary tradition and practices of revision in two periods of U.S. cultural history self-consciously concerned with the development of a national literature: the American Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance. Framing my study of the mid-nineteenth century with close readings of Locke's anthology and Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, I argue that a conversation between the two "renaissances" about the nature of literary history reveals certain political dimensions of revisionism and ideological investments in literary origins not to be found in studying the periods separately. An introductory chapter draws on Locke's rewriting of Ralph Waldo Emerson and D. H. Lawrence to argue for the possibility of reading the American Renaissance through the Harlem Renaissance, considering "renaissance" as both a contested term of cultural approbation and an organizing metaphor for the writers and critics of both literary moments.;The middle chapters excavate various rhetorics of racial difference within mid-nineteenth-century representations of literary history. In chapter two, I relate Hawthorne's anxious vision of gender and national literary development in "Mrs. Hutchinson" to the literary genealogy of his allegory of racial "commixture" in "Rappaccini's Daughter." Tracing in Melville's Pierre a series of allusions that refer consistently to images of racial mixture in prior texts, the third chapter argues that this narrative allows Melville to scrutinize and critique the prevailing racial ideology of "Young America in Literature." Turning finally to Quicksand for its sweeping perspective on the themes of literary genealogy treated throughout the dissertation, the concluding chapter reads the heroine's journey through different regions and cities as Larsen's critical exploration of the geography of her predecessors: Frances Harper, Theodore Dreiser, William Dean Howells, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Stribling, Carl Van Vechten, and Jean Toomer.