Dark Princess Research Articles

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature Aida Husen Yogita Goyal . Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. ix + 277 pp. Among the foundational assumptions of the diverse field of black cultural studies is the idea that "Africa," since Middle Passage, has operated as an ambivalent and overburdened sign within the cultural lexicons of the African Diaspora. Variously imagined as a utopian land of origins, the site of a barbaric prehistory, the promise of redemptive cultural reclamation, and the foreclosure of that very promise, the idea of "Africa" has, for centuries, been called on to articulate the collective, post-traumatic fantasies of forcibly dispersed populations. As such, representations of Africa in black diasporic writing have occupied a curious relationship to the category of transnational discourse. On one hand, diasporic writers have enduringly gestured toward a desire for cultural continuity that transcends national borders. Yet on the other hand, representations of such desire typically foreground the loss, dislocation, and fantasy of origins characteristic of New World experience, while neglecting the experiences, values, and perspectives of continental Africans. In Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, Yogita Goyal articulates and explores the contexts and terms of this paradox, providing a refreshing and timely consideration of nation and diaspora in global black literatures and cultures. Speaking from within the discursive field of contemporary black Atlantic studies, Goyal argues compellingly for the decentering of Western frames of consciousness. Recent works within the field, she laments, have left "little room for Africa, allocating it a marginal role in the construction of vibrant transnational cultural transformations" (225). In her monograph, Goyal argues the desired moral and epistemological shifts are achieved through the articulation and prioritization of three essential yet heretofore under-theorized categories of analysis: romance, as a literary and political modality (7); Africa, as a contemporary, geopolitical locale, as well as a "phantasmatic" projection from the West (8); and the dynamic relationship between nation and diaspora, between "national and transnational concerns" (7). [End Page 789] Goyal's thematic focus on romance allows her to filter wide-ranging cultural and political analyses through critical apparatuses anchored in literary studies, most notably genre study, textual analysis, and biography. Reading as a literary critic and arguing for the articulation of a "black Atlantic canon" that consists primarily of novels (8), Goyal makes an insistent case for the priority of literary texts and methods within the disciplinarily diverse field of African diasporic studies. Literary scholars will be pleased with her consistently lucid and insightful close readings, and with her persuasive substantiation of the fundamental disciplinary claim that "form makes certain statements possible, and others impossible" (107). Nevertheless, Goyal is at her strongest when she bridges the literary and the extra-literary, the textual and the political, to produce an expansive yet nuanced, richly historicized vision of black Atlantic discourse. For example, in chapter 1 (the monograph's strongest chapter), Goyal's exploration of romance as a literary form in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood leads seamlessly into her interrogation of romance as a modality for complex, and at times subconscious or self-contradictory, political desire. In a sensitive and well-contextualized reading of the text, Goyal deftly demonstrates the capacity of romance as genre to "dissolve" the "contradictions" of turn-of-the-century African American political desire, preserving the complexities of ideology and identification within a unified narrative (32). Extending the arguments made in chapter 1, the first half of the book takes shape as an epistemology of romance in African diasporic literature, threaded through examinations of Hopkins's novel, W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, and "the first major African work of Ethiopianism" (109), Joseph Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound. Much like Hopkins, Goyal argues, Du Bois in Dark Princess turns to the "salvational logic" of romance (94) to assuage his disappointments with domestic racial politics, even as the price of this transnational fantasy becomes the usurpation of "African agency" (100). By contrast, Hayford, the focal figure of chapter 3, exposes and critiques the Western biases of Du Bois's paradigms; yet he, too, ultimately arrives at a romantic, anticolonial vision of Africa as the "mystical" (114) and "eternal" (116) "spiritual conservatory...

Du Bois’ Theory of Beauty: Battles of Femininity in Darkwater and Dark Princess

This article explores Du Bois’ theory of beauty that rests upon the axis of racial uplift and troubling, if not misogynistic, portrayals of women in his fictive works. The article employs depictions of women in two of Du Bois’ endeavors—Dark Princess and Darkwater—finding that his rigid abidance to the mandate that “all art should be propaganda” leaves women he deemed unattractive by the wayside. In his fiction and prose pieces, beauty is inextricably linked to politics and consequently the standards of including black women in art and literature became prescriptions for their places in life and his program of racial uplift. Had he taken the advice from other authors, such as Langston Hughes, he may have enjoyed the aesthetic liberty to invite all forms of exterior blackness into his project of aesthetic racial uplift serving early twentieth century black activism.

Cosmopolitan Fantasies, Aesthetics, and Bodily Value: W. E. B. Du Bois's <em>Dark Princess</em> and the Trans/Gendering of Kautilya

Author(s): Alston, Vermonja R | Abstract: The recent turn to a transnational American literary cosmopolitanism, coupled with efforts to move beyond what Paul Gilroy calls “ethnic absolutes,” have generated a resurgence of interest in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1928 romance novel, Dark Princess. In addition, the last two decades have witnessed tentative movements to bridge the gap between American ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. This essay begins with the premise that there are compelling reasons to reread Dark Princess in light of twenty-first century debates about postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism, but it also points to some of the hazards of reading the novel outside of the social and aesthetic politics of the decades between the two world wars. The main part of this paper is an attempt to address the gendered and sexualized body politics of Du Bois’s aesthetic practices through an analysis of his essay “Criteria of Negro Art” and his novel Dark Princess. Allusions in the novel to the fourth-century BCE Indian political philosopher Kautilya and his treatise Arthasâstra suggests that Du Bois’s naming of his princess, Kautilya, was neither accidental nor insignificant. This trans/gendering of Kautilya speaks to a gender and sexual politics inherent to German theories of the aesthetic, to which Du Bois remained wedded. Scholarly fantasies of cosmopolitanism tend to ignore the extent to which such fantasies depend upon ideologies of family and the reproductive bodies of women.

But that's just mad! Reading the utopian impulse in Dark princess and Black empire

This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark princess and George Schuyler's Black empire as attempts to accept a project that is intimately familiar with the poetics of speculative prophecy driven by the dynamics of utopia. Both novels illustrate a type of racial utopian vision for the future in which a transformed global social order emerges. However, Dark princess and Black empire engage the often uneasy relationship between the utopian possible and the more constrictive, anti-utopian probable. By examining the ways that Du Bois and Schuyler make use of their utopian novels, this paper explores how the trajectories of possibility in the two novels provide insights into the politics and poetics of their speculative writings.

The Anatomy of a Symbol: Reading W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess: A Romance

The Anatomy of a Symbol:Reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess: A Romance Rebecka Rutledge Fisher (bio) Preamble For this reading of Du Bois's 1928 narrative Dark Princess: A Romance, I briefly take recourse to the aesthetics propounded by Du Bois two years earlier in "Criteria of Negro Art." As with many of W. E. B. Du Bois's writings—whatever their genre or disciplinary field—"Criteria" has become famous for that metaphor with which it culminates: "[A]ll Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists" (1000). The content of his essay indicates that art is both a concept and an activity of major importance in an aspect of criticism that was central to Du Bois's interests: the linking of art, including literature, to various types of social phenomena, and an articulation of his vision of the role and function of art in social and political life. In his conception of art as a medium of exchange, Du Bois saw its expression as representative of a preponderance of ideas and ideals; its charge was that of a heuristic, no matter its power to condense social relations to symbols of augury or possibility. Certainly there is something dreamlike in art's power of condensation, such that [End Page 91] its expression of individual and collective desire might propel the reader and artist alike into another world. Like the dream image, the work of art mirrors something of our present existence; like the dream image, again, it bypasses the conflicts of the present to imagine an action that lies in a longed-for future. In "Criteria of Negro Art," longing and reason are interrelated; it is the desire—a very human desire—to know the world through the eye of an ideal and "true" spirit that leads the thinking and moral African American to order his or her world, according to a perception of the beautiful. In Du Bois's parlance, we may take as synonyms for Beauty a number of correlating classical ideals that Du Bois names outright: Truth, Goodness, and Right all pertain to the beautiful (Du Bois 1926, 1000). The reasoning mind—the working mind possessed by those who think in a space that is seemingly and paradoxically unlimited by the bounds of tradition but that is, in fact "ever bounded by Truth and Justice" (1000)—is able not only to perceive the beautiful, but also to create (to "realize") the beautiful. Said otherwise, the beautiful is an effect of what Du Bois terms the "Seeing Eye," the "Cunning Hand," and the "Feeling Heart" (994). Each is indicative of one's ability to perceive and, in turn, of one's capacity to realize. The criterion of Beauty emerges here as a concept-metaphor that guides his discussion of African American desire, which, in turn, serves as the somewhat veiled motivity that advances his lecture. Du Bois asks pointedly, "What do we want? What is the thing we are after?" (993). This question leads him to present his auditors with a sort of cultural intertextuality that draws into focus the countryside of Scotland, the rural beauty of a Vai village, the medieval majesty of the Cathedral at Cologne, the "haunting" phrases of (what we might imagine to be) the sorrow songs, and the feminine beauty of the Venus of Milo, frozen in marble and eroded by time. Such beauty African Americans would—were they truly free, were they free to inhabit a world where they know, create, realize, and enjoy—ultimately desire as a foundation for life. He describes this desire as multiply social, in that it responds to strictures of economy, education, racial and ethnic identity, and so on. Beauty as an object of desire is thus central to his discussion of African American art. And art, as Du Bois puts it, is not separable from a political program that has as its goal the liberation of black folk. [End Page 92] So many critics have felt themselves plagued by Du Bois's creative stance because they feel it privileges propaganda over art, and indeed Du Bois seems to say so himself: "I stand in utter...

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Fourth Dimension

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Fourth Dimension Nicole A. Waligora-Davis Cornell University When democracy fails for one group in the United States it fails for the nation, and when it fails for the United States it fails for the world. A disenfranchised group compels the disenfranchisement of other groups. —W. E. B. Du Bois, "Negro Citizen" America is teaching the world . . . that ability and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but the widespread possibility for the majority of mankind if only they have a decent chance in life. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess On November 4, 1947, Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American woman, was arrested, along with several of her sons, after having killed her white neighbor, John Ethron Stratford, in Ellaville, Georgia during a dispute over livestock (Martin 1985, 252). Recounting Stratford's promised and realized threat during her murder trial—"I am going to kill the negroes this morning"—the transcript of Rosa Lee Ingram's testimony within the [End Page 57] appellate record is as truncated as her day-long trial was summarily short (Ingram v. State 1948). The Georgia Supreme Court's redaction of the Ingrams' case to a single paragraph of Rosa Lee's testimony, in contradistinction to the preserved pages of circumstantial prosecutorial evidence and trial testimonies, gestures toward the raced and gendered coordinates predicating the outcome of the trial, the appellate, and the parole process. Ingram's edited testimony points to the complexities of this case. A case seemingly hinging on the definition of murder versus self-defense, the Ingrams' judicial proceeding cites the malfeasance effected through race, gender, and their conjunction within the economic and social systems of the South. A widowed mother of 12 children, Rosa Lee Ingram, like the deceased, was a sharecropper (Martin 1985, 252). Their properties abutted one another, and her livestock trekked onto Stratford's leased land, a trespass that provoked his ire that morning. Having taken seriously her neighbor's admonishment, Ingram abandoned her own fieldwork in pursuit of a mule; it was a chase that left her confronted with the armed and angered Stratford. By her account, armed with rifle and knife, Stratford pointed his gun sights at her and threatened to "kill the negroes this morning" (Ingram v. State 1948). And while the sheriff claimed that she accused Stratford of shooting her "between the eyes" (Ingram v. State 1948), Mrs. Ingram's testimony and injuries demonstrated Stratford's assault with a rifle butt. Managing to wrestle the gun from him, she beat and killed him. That the competing trial testimonies disagree on the members of the Ingram family responsible for Stratford's death and question the degree of this mother's injuries at the hand of Stratford matter less for my consideration here than the ways in which this event engages a democracy deferred and revisioned. The Ingrams' case history serves as a staging ground for mapping W. E. B. Du Bois's "fourth dimension" (Aptheker 1985, 255)—his vision for a new world whose blueprint finds its fullest articulation in the aftermath of two world wars. The cartographic imperative and economic reforms underwriting this political philosophy and social plan remember the centrality of both the politically marginalized and the colonized "colored world" to global democracy. [End Page 58] Their case led to more than a decade of political protest and civil rights agitation. Featured as a platform item by the Communist party (New York Times, August 7, 1948), the Ingrams' judicial proceedings inspired the Women's Committee for Equal Justice, a Communist-based women's group led by Mary Church Terrell (Martin 1985, 261, 264), and compelled the drafting of a UN petition on these defendants' behalf. Their murder trial tracks a stubborn and resilient black violence. The strategic ambiguity captured in my use of the term "black violence" seeks to capture a semantic range inflected not simply in...

The Negro and the Dark Princess: Two Legacies of the Universal Races Congress

<i>The Negro</i> and the <i>Dark Princess</i>: Two Legacies of the Universal Races Congress

The Black Savant and the Dark Princess

The Black Savant and the Dark Princess

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man

Contemporary critics have read The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a masculinist text that, in Hazel Carby's words, reveals the “highly gendered structures of intellectual and political thought and feeling” in Du Bois' work. However, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic R ace Man” argues that Du Bois's concern with black male leadership style began before the writing of Souls and continues well after it, in his less well-known writing. While still a young scholar, Du Bois wrote about an African American “feminine man” who, in joining with the more “masculine” Teutonic would produce a common human/American civilization by a racial division of labor. In his 1928 novel, Dark Princess, this “feminine man” finds his story as a dandified Du Bois-like member of the Talented-Tenth charged with fomenting a revolution against a world-wide color line. With this activist-dandy, whose nattily-clad body signifies on, rather than blindly accepts, masculinist tropes, Du Bois realizes a long-standing wish for racial leadership by what he calls “men who were--different.”

African American Intellectuals Symposium

When I was invited present this symposium I accepted with great enthusiasm for occasions when we can gather together as feminist critics and engage with the work of black female intellectuals as the main focus of our attention, celebrate one of our own as it were, have been few and far between. In particular, the chance publicly engage and celebrate the work of Claudia Tate was particularly attractive me. Claudia's contributions literary and cultural criticism have been important and original in so many public ways, but I also want signal at the outset that her intellectual presence in the academy is also of personal significance me. The body of Claudia's work is so substantial, conceptually complex and varied, that when I sat down write, my excitement vanished and was replaced by anxiety. If I had twenty minutes, which essays or books, or issues, or themes should I, or could I select? Claudia brought an understanding of the working lives of black women writers my desk and into my consciousness: she made me stop short and ask myself why I had avoided or neglected discuss, in my own writing, the crucially important issues of narrative pleasure and desire; and she made me realize how careless my own readings were when I found the novels of black women in the post-Reconstruction period opaque, opaque, that is, when I was not finding them downright indigestible. I remember my first encounter with this statement: For a decade black women writers of the post-Reconstruction era reaffirmed in novels their belief that virtuous women like themselves could reform society by domesticating Claudia's argument in Domestic Allegories of Po litical Desire was a revelation and a gift, and it helped me read differently. Claudia is also a non-conformist and I have always identified with and taken great pleasure in her acts of critical rebellion, which are numerous. She breaks down barriers of critical parochialism and safety, challenges the limits of conventional paradigms, and refuses bend beneath the sibboleths of the field. In fact, Claudia is a perfect fit for my favorite split infinitive, to boldly go where no woman has gone before. First, she has been an intellectual leader in the detailed excavation of texts that have been too long ignored by the American critical establishment. Ignored is a very polite way of putting it. While canons of African American fiction have been slowly and methodically built, Claudia's cannons have been wheeled into the arena, fused and discharged. After the dust has cleared we have all been able see that these traditions were built by denying the validity of the texts which did not fit the paradigm being used. Claudia has been irresistibly drawn, it seems, the texts that no one wa nts talk about. A tenacious and meticulous researcher, in addition being an innovative close reader, she is also something of a magician. We think the swords drawn through the box on stage are going draw blood but she inevitably shows us that there is nothing fear from, but much learn by, confronting post-Reconstruction fiction, W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee or Richard Wright's Savage Holiday, for example. I have also felt from the earliest of Claudia's essays that we shared a mission, that we both were desperate de-parochialize departments of English and destroy, forever, the narrow ethnic definitions within which traditions of English literature have been reproduced in the academy. In this task, as in all her work, Claudia has always refused reductive visions, seeking instead articulate the complexly different black voices that speak a general or universal human condition. The interaction of race and gender in the work of black women is for Claudia a site of an increased breadth of vision rather than a cause of narrowing our focus, as many English department critics mistakenly claim. …

"More than Romance": Genre and Geography in Dark Princess

W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess: A Romance tends to cause problems for genre-minded readers. The 1928 novel, Du Bois's second of five, partakes in the conventions of Bildungsroman, adventure, social realism, messianic prophecy, and, as its subtitle would indicate, romance. As such, the novel provides an interesting and often misdiagnosed case study in generic pastiche and parody. In Arnold Rampersad's frequently cited formulation, the novel is a "queer combination of outright propaganda and Arabian tale, of social realism and quaint romance." 1 Du Bois's contemporaries, too, found the conjunction of mundane and elevated language, of politics and romance, of local and international settings, to be unsettling or inappropriate. 2 An alternate view finds such readings inadequate, based as they are on a constricting realist viewpoint. Claudia Tate, in her introduction to the novel's latest edition, holds that "if his critics had judged the novel according to the values of an eroticized revolutionary art instead of the conventions of social realism, they probably would have celebrated Dark Princess as a visionary work." Both Tate and Paul Gilroy see the novel, and especially its closing scene of multicultural pageant, as a model for a new black political idealism. 3 Critical responses, then, tend to be split between those put off by the novel's mix of registers between realist and romantic, and those who celebrate its turn to prophetic messianism.

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles (review)

MLR, 96. I, 200 MLR, 96. I, 200 argues, is one in which black public intellectuals have refused to take on the 'landlocked role' of race champion and group representative. In repudiating the essentialistdogmas of racial 'authenticity',the writersconcerned have moved from the provincialism of the ethnos to the wider public responsibilitiesof the politikos. They have, in short, kept faith with the Dreyfusard ideal of cosmopolitan universalism, and in doing so they vitally illuminate modes of resistance to the reductivetribalismof contemporaryidentitypolitics. W. E. B. Du Bois is undoubtedly the hero of the book. A good half of the discussionis centrallyconcerned with his pioneering effortsto enlarge the function and domain of the blackintellectual beyond the duties of racial uplift, and even in those chapters which deal with other writers, the Du Boisian presence is strongly felt as touchstone and inspiration in the quest for ethical and cultural values unbounded by the colour line. Shaped by the pragmatist pluralism of William James, Posnock's Du Bois emerges as an attractive figure, constantly in motion against fixed categories of identity and difference. His theorizing of the 'modern' intellectual'scosmopolitanroleis tellinglycontrastedwith (andpreferredto) Booker T. Washington's more 'organic' and separatist notion of race work. A further juxtaposition readsDu Bois and FrantzFanontogetheras 'prophetsof ninetiespostethnicity ', and notes, with some irony, that the black nationalistswho (mis)quoted this radicalpair with such fervourin the 196oswere ideologically closer, in fact, to the conservatismof Washington. Ranging freelyacrossthe twentiethcentury,Posnock'semphasisis on intellectual history,with an occasional admixtureof literarycriticism.Selectively,he constructs an 'anti-racerace lineage' of blackwriterswho, scepticalof group identity, have in the Du Boisian tradition attempted to situate themselves at the unstable interface between the particularand the universal,between ethnicity and cosmopolitanism. Starting from Pauline Hopkins's Of OneBlood,the line zigzags through some unexpected groupings and illustrativetexts. In one chapter, Du Bois's novel Dark Princess is set alongside Nella Larsen's Quicksand. In another, Locke, Hurston, and Toomer are tied in with Ralph Ellison'sessay 'The LittleMan at Chehaw Station'. Self-inventionand the 'agon'of the blackintellectuallinkthe unlikelybut intriguing pair of Baldwinand Baraka,with a backwardsglance at Claude McKay's Banjoand a sideways one at the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. The final chapter examineshow the traditionisbeing reconfiguredin the avant-gardeworkof Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. Color andCulture is one of those books so prolificin suggestion,so stimulatingin its juxtapositions, so profound in its critique of racial essentialism,that the reviewer's task becomes an exercise in frustration: such intellectual riches do not lend themselves to a short summary. CharlesJohnson, award-winningauthor of Middle Passage and Dreamer, describes Posnock'scontribution to American literaryhistory as 'monumentallyimportant'.Michael Rogin says, 'This is a book to contend with'. I say 'Amen'. UNIVERSITY OF READING CHRISTINE MACLEOD How WeBecame Posthuman. Virtual Bodiesin Cybernetics, Literature andInformatics.By N. KATHERINE HAYLES. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1999- xiv + 350 pp. $49; [39.25 (paperbound$i8; [i4.50). N. Katherine Hayles, who according to the book jacket has advanced degrees in both Chemistryand English,setsout, she says,to tell three 'stories'.The firstis 'how informationlost itsbody';the second, how the cyborgwas createdas a technological argues, is one in which black public intellectuals have refused to take on the 'landlocked role' of race champion and group representative. In repudiating the essentialistdogmas of racial 'authenticity',the writersconcerned have moved from the provincialism of the ethnos to the wider public responsibilitiesof the politikos. They have, in short, kept faith with the Dreyfusard ideal of cosmopolitan universalism, and in doing so they vitally illuminate modes of resistance to the reductivetribalismof contemporaryidentitypolitics. W. E. B. Du Bois is undoubtedly the hero of the book. A good half of the discussionis centrallyconcerned with his pioneering effortsto enlarge the function and domain of the blackintellectual beyond the duties of racial uplift, and even in those chapters which deal with other writers, the Du Boisian presence is strongly felt as touchstone and inspiration in the quest for ethical and cultural values unbounded by the colour line. Shaped by the pragmatist pluralism of William James, Posnock's Du Bois emerges as an attractive figure, constantly in motion against fixed categories of identity and difference. His theorizing of the 'modern' intellectual'scosmopolitanroleis...

Two Steppin': Richard Wright's Encounter with Blue-Jazz

Tf HE Black American writer's relationship to folk idioms and ex. pressions has been a crucial feature in the development of modern Black American literature. Preceded by Frances E. W. Harper and James Campbell, Paul Laurence Dunbar attempted to retrieve Black dialect as a literary medium from the clutches of minstrelsy. He was joined in this effort by Charles Chesnutt, especially with Chesnutt's pioneering The Conjure Woman (I899). Early critics and commentators, such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson, moved to embrace folk expressions, particularly the spirituals, and urged younger writers to explore the possibilities of applying folk forms and themes to more formal literary modes. Johnson helped to show the way in his God's Trombones (1927); DuBois did not in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (i9ii) and Dark Princess (1928). Much of the energy of the Harlem Renaissance writers sought to extend and refine the literary applications of the Black American vernacular. Essential to many of the experiments during the 1920S and early 1930S was the recognition that understanding and projecting the core Black experience in literature demanded a respect for the eloquence of folk expressions. Such a respect was rooted in an ultimate faith in the range and complexity of those experiences to work beyond simple background, beyond the picturesque. In the case of the blues idiom, an idiom central to the secular Afro-American world-view, the result of its application in poetry and creative prose could be the development of a tone as often irreverent, ironic and comic as it was melancholy. Put another way, the result could be a narrative and lyric voice grand enough to capture the ambiguities, ambivalences, and frequent heroics in the modern Black experience. The often dazzling successes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown brought this idiom to a central position in a developing literary tradition.