Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Racism in Literature - Karen Overbye (essay date 2001)

Karen Overbye (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Overbye, Karen. “Resisting Ideologies of Race and Gender: Evelyn Scott's Use of the Tragic Mulatto Figure.” In Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist, edited by Dorothy M. Scura and Paul C. Jones, pp. 123-39. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Overbye focuses on Evelyn Scott's depiction of two mulatto characters—in Migrations and A Calendar of Sin—through whom Scott comments on the racial, cultural, and artistic oppression of Blacks in American society.]

Whether in direct response to her writing or in discussing her contribution to American letters, contemporary literary critics often drew attention to Evelyn Scott's outspoken protest against the lack of artistic freedom and the oppressive gender, race, and class ideologies in America. Several critics noted her treatment of African American characters in her novels and praised her...

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