Mark Whalan

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Statement

 

Dr. Mark Whalan joined the University of Oregon as the Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English in 2011, after beginning his career at the University of Exeter in the UK. He specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and has published four books: The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (University of Tennessee Press 2006); Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (University of Tennessee Press 2007); The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (University Press of Florida, 2008; and American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies, and has published in African American Review, Modernism/Modernity, American Art, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Journal of American Studies. His current work examines the relations between American modernism, World War One, and the development of the federal state.

Publications

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America

This book offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), and their development of unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism and rural decline.

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

This is the first book to explore the wide-ranging significance of World War One to the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Reading authors such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the book argues that the war served as a crucial event conditioning African American cultural understandings of masculinity, memory, and nationality in the 1920s... Read more

The Letters of Jean Toomer

The Letters of Jean Toomer

ean Toomer was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and in the  twentieth-century modernist movement, and this represents the first-ever  annotated collection of his correspondence. The letters included in the  volume were written in the five years surrounding Toomer’s publication  of his seminal work, Cane, and lend unique insight into the life,  aesthetics, politics, and work of... Read more