Rural Literary Reuse of Langston Hughes's Poetry in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the circulation of, and commentary on, Langston Hughes's poems in rural publications during the 1920s and 1930s. It uses the journal of a black Catholic agricultural and industrial high school in rural Maryland, the Cardinal's Notebook, co-edited by Tuskegee alumna Constance Daniel, as a case study to explore how Hughes's thematically urban poems were recast in important ways by the editorial practices of rural publishers. Russ Castronovo argues persuasively that writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois conveyed complex meanings through the editorial juxtaposition of materials in Harlem Renaissance journals such as the Crisis: that the meaning of particular poems, essays, and images was in part created through context. Similarly, this article contends that the rural journals that reprinted urban creative works during the Harlem Renaissance often did so in ways that suggested distinctive thematic emphases and meanings.