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1. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Recalcitrant Subjects, and Wrong Feeling 2021

   https://ncsu.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwpV3da9RAEF-0vvii9QN7WmURuSI0JJfNRwO1pT28WggVW0Xfls3u5np45I7b5P_vzGbTJqBU8DUzhN2d7Oz8NjO_IeRDWbBYhTLzYpVJL1JB4BXYMkxowYIsldGkKIaXOWTW1cLYbHf0jdZLi_Xa-Gol_RMAcVEcRizw80V9OT3utc9oPlVyia7BNA_JoxDZZ2wh3-WtR0YClfZPM-ClJPzlflfCaYfcPhN85GUxYAdMrOsdT85J9y9FeofP7CnZdMO2OSfY6aCffO9bwkPLctGRO_7_FLfJExeq0pP223pGHujqOXmVuwtOQ8c0v-VkNi_I-eH10QXmUtEcwLKu9syhf31EvzUL-duISu1TCFHFUi5qOB5rCh4LZ2v2Kcjoz82qmtOZttXxL8mP2efv0y-ea9TgSdjStaeTVAF0SwXEmkWWBnGAbaoEyMJUqUyxCMJCKRKIhVjKJBOqKGKhpCxFkZaKsR1CAeZkpYonErwKgLZYJEIAVgt0Eqki1Acj8rEzDF-3RBwcAQwYkXdG5M6IIzLG9eXIb1FhAo1sL2E4DHr6ld-t9Ii8HyrORWMMPzjL71c6Pz37B6Wri4HSnlMqV7DWUrgSiFWlkYVroDkeaM5bDvI_Ke4OFME5yIF4x4qXG9kOqC_yet81d64LJh9hrTa_glA7tuxvYASM7F___VVvyOMQU31sls8u2ao3jX5LtnAfvLM78QYGvzc6

   Priest, Madison

   Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 67, Issue 4, pp. 359 - 384.

   Helga Crane, the heroine of Nella Larsen’s critically acclaimed 1928 novel, Quicksand, is a maddening protagonist. Hysterical, reactive, impulsive, and compulsive, she seems constitutionally incapa... Read more

   Helga Crane, the heroine of Nella Larsen’s critically acclaimed 1928 novel, Quicksand, is a maddening protagonist. Hysterical, reactive, impulsive, and compulsive, she seems constitutionally incapable of finding any sort of happiness. In accounting for Helga’s frustrating and inexplicable choices, critics tend to blame either Helga’s psyche or her environment. This essay offers an alternative approach, one that troubles the sharp distinctions between interior and exterior on which these readings implicitly rely by arguing that Helga and recalcitrant subjects like her exhibit “wrong feeling.” Wrong feeling is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon—an enactment of the modernist allergy to sentiment that nonetheless takes up modernism’s key tropes. Manifesting as affective overflowing, it has no discernible locus in either self or world and yields a series of repetitive, frustrating, and ineffectual choices. In disrupting the divide between interior and exterior, wrong feeling provides an unsettling critique of the world that undoes Helga, even as it implicates Helga in her own undoing. In the end, this essay tells a story of punishment—of the iterative mechanisms and repercussions of feeling the wrong way, about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons—tracing the workings of wrong feeling within Larsen’s first novel and beckoning toward the ways the idea might help us recognize the import of recalcitrant subjectivity beyond Quicksand itself. Read less

   Journal Article  |  Full Text Online

2. NELLA LARSEN'S "PASSING": A PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION 2017

   https://ncsu.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwlV1Nb9QwEB3RcuFSoHx0oawsgcopXceOEwetKm2_xCGlFaVSb5btOF0hVFDT3vkb_D1-CTOJ0zbigLj44shx8uzxPHv8BuBd46SqhS8TVZc-yWrOE0cpw2ywkpeFz1Lnxps58Ha4C0MbD9tflz0_jD9vlmuSQV-Bh8hWCorbOjo7vTO3QvVHmnT9p9AyCmlKJWe2IWWhtNimNJB_HSyPVqJoj_uYxPE-yNhKi7j0HD6G46HTXcQJ5Tm4H3o_6-QOO42LQdrxHx_4BNaiF8oWfcVTeBAu1-FlFfcuW7bFqlu55XYd1ro8l-9bFqMOn8F8vtz5RIFTrEJmHC5___zVzmfLHXaCzjj28QNbsJM-Vw373rBxaONzODs8-LL3MYmJGBIvM3Gd-LoMsmmcrinvHQ-N5k57X_o6BCFdpqSzGXeUXsUHS_I1VnNL0oUqCwodyg1gSGPKplapR6uBpEzZ3FrkYjzkWe1E0BOYjuExlk5ezGdyKJEUqQlsDXCZH70Sh-mO45Q0CLQhoA0BPYENAtN8u_IX9qZtzQJJERIxneNLXnQA3zZA7mDOS6xI7iFu4jxuTQ-MOU1LcjQ18Tdy-s4nsDmMibuHRZqjyc5EKl_9Z3Ov4RF1vw-T2YTV66ub8AZWaShNYUVW-1gW57tY7h7sTTsVaCyr_QTLI3E87WbEHw12_rA

   TATE, CLAUDIA

   African American Review, Vol. 50, Issue 4, pp. 597 - 601.

   Journal Article  |  Full Text Online

3. Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella... 2023

   https://ncsu.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/link/0/eLvHCXMwpV1ZS8NAEF48XnwRL7xlH0QRXdtsksaICCKKD1XwwsewV2jUWjFW_PnOHtnYUkHxJbRLGdqdrzM7386B0GbOw1hSkZJYpoJEstkkXI8MY4qFzTQRUcD5EJnzWNXCjMxib_xbtbAGytWlsn9QrxcKC_AalAxPUDM8f6VoQ8HB_7rs9nLbKcRw77ryoyddz_9b01jZvalyJo2b8mTgZfGpJLlhujNnn2t2RlMhVzo5arcN0a-bvXLdL8RTacd-jDrVdu1stWffrbnOH7AG7qIsWI88uAo0xzfQsM6LqkwkTQnYV0sDqBFrzq46arH4ThoYI1mRjtbfBnbqyrApp2miO6E-dvX9EA33mb6gtHNnBrtmD3kzn2MI0Y2WkYGETEvInIRxNEmTNKWm2POm9toHZhCh_yX2SltLaAx_h29HGNtYzJxF7mbQtNtufGLBMIvG1MscWmw76rnEW7jt97-cRx8GIngAIofYA2QPe3jsYdAsBnDgAXDgGhzYgQMXL_ioc2zwgS0-tsujRucYe4QsoPvzs7vTC-LmbRAR0NY7AWOfxCxiinOhjX2c5JIyDiFnmEdM5rpAD04zivKQSSbinHEwARFVIhCKxa1wCWGIVtNcxoEA5wCxd8xajEHI3VStSHKqDpbRTrV32avtp5L9pKmVP3x2FU3VYF1DE-9vfbWOJrQF2TCK_gL73Gzb

   Chen, Hsiao-Wen

   Journal Of Modern Literature, Vol. 46, Issue 4, pp. 146 - 166.

   Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) demonstrates a situated form of Black cosmofeminism to capture the difficult process through which a deviant mixed-race heroine negotiates her place in the Black com... Read more

   Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) demonstrates a situated form of Black cosmofeminism to capture the difficult process through which a deviant mixed-race heroine negotiates her place in the Black community. At core, Black cosmofeminism interrogates oppressive racial and sexual politics enacted in domestic, local, and national spheres to envision a more inclusive cosmopolitan US Black community open to sexually, racially, and nationally "impure" subjects. However, far from advocating the erasure of local identities, such a reimagining of the domestic Black community as cosmofeminist instead foregrounds group identification and communal bonding developed in response to transnational displacement and discrimination. Working in tandem with consumer cosmopolitanism, Black cosmofeminism places the African American woman consumer center stage and traces how her desire, body, and identity are not only constructed alongside globally circulated commodities but also made localized and resistant to the global commodification and sexualization of Black and mixed-raced women. Read less

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