• 영미문화
• /
• 제17권1호
• /
• pp.191-206
• /
• 2017

Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Richard Wright (1908-60) lived in almost the same era, but it is obvious that their ways of describing the people, who are manipulated by gender-based controlling images, are different. Both Wright and Hughes try to reveal how reality is disturbed by the black men's and white women's prevailing stereotypes; however, their works have very different tones. In Richard Wright's short story, "The Man Who Killed a Shadow," and Langston Hughes' poems in his early days, "Silhouette" and "The South," the stereotyped images of black masculinity and white womanhood are transformed and destroyed. While Hughes celebrates the black culture amicably, Wright depicts completely hopeless black men living in the world dominated by white supremacy. This difference is indicative of the shifting views from Harlem Renaissance to Post-Harlem Renaissance. While romantic tones can be still found in Hughes' poems, Wright subverts the power dynamics between the black man and the white woman, and completely ruins sentimentality which tends to be attached to the Southern stories in the $19^{th}$ century.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제54권2호
• /
• pp.235-261
• /
• 2008

Countee Cullen has never been fully understood as a poet or as a man, for there existed certain ambiguities concerning his earlier life including family background. But a short but enormously important biography written by Shirley Washington, his niece, a daughter of his youngest sister, titled Countee Cullen's Secret Revealed by Miracle Book: A Biography of His Childhood in New Orleans, has at last come to shed some lights on his childhood which has never been disclosed by Cullen himself or anyone else. Now we can safely say that Countee Cullen was a combination of two personalities, James S. Carter, Jr. and Countee Cullen, In other words, he was a good example of a 'dichotomous personality.' Such disclosure of two conflicting personalities gives us a rare chance to re-examine his literary works. We can now put in perspective why in his first collection of poems Color Countee Cullen was so ironic, dark, cynic, and pessimistic about the life and the world. Also, we can understand why Cullen's response to the jazz was so complex and contradictory and in what ways he used artistic technique to conceal his own feelings. Thanks to Washington's biography, we are now able to locate the real cause of his failure to mature as a poet and of his failure to materialize what was promised in the beginning of his literary career.