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Book Review of Quicksand and Passing (American Women Writers Series)

Quicksand and Passing (American Women Writers Series)
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"Alice Walker
"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."

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

Joyce Carol Oates
"This series is an ambitious, exciting, and highly valuable contribution to the reclamation of American women's lost literature."

From the Back Cover
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 novel's greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the them 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."