Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature

 

Book Description:

Winner of the 2008 President's Book Award at Texas Tech, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006) maps a tradition of African American modernist writing influenced by jazz music.  Looking in depth at work by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Michael S. Harper, and Albert Murray, the book argues for the simultaneous aesthetic and political influence of jazz music on Black modernist literature across various musical styles—from blues and early jazz to bebop to free jazz to a contemporary neoclassical return.  The book combines literary criticism with a studied attention to musical practice, a combination which Joel Dinerstein suggested, in a review for American Literature, made Swinging the Vernacular “the best introduction of jazz for literary scholars yet.”

 

Author Bio: 

Michael Borshuk is Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Department of English.  He is the editor of the forthcoming collection, Jazz and American Culture, for Cambridge University Press, and has published widely on African American literature, American modernism, and music.  For ten years, from 1999 to 2009, he wrote on jazz regularly for Coda magazine.