Quicksand and Passing

by Deborah E. McDowell (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1986

  $18.07

  Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable. --Alice Walker
  
  Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt. --Maya Angelou

  A hugely influential and insighful writer. --The New York Times

  Larsen's heroines are complex, restless, figures, whose hungers and frustrations will haunt every sensitive reader. Quicksand and Passing are slender novels with huge themes. -- Sarah Waters

  A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity. -Women's Studies International Forum

  Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.63

  Quicksand (1928) is the first novel to give a voice to the sexual desires of a black woman. Helga Crane, the book?s protagonist, is trapped in the conflict between an active and a passive sexual behaviour, between sexual fufilment and middle-class respectability. Conflicts of race and sex even a religious conversion cannot resolve. Passing, written a year later, is overtly about black people who ?pass? for white, but in a veiled way it also is the desire of one woman for another - a new and daring theme for the writing of the time. The eroticism and sexuality that Nella Larsen was only able to whisper has in recent times been spoken loud and clear by Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and many other black women writers who recognize Nella Larsen as a pioneer and inspiration.