Book contents
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Whiteness and National Identity
- Part II Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
- Chapter 8 Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Writing
- Chapter 9 Whiteness and the Slave Narrative
- Chapter 10 Passing in Modernist Literature
- Chapter 11 Whiteness in African American Writers’ Nonfictional Works
- Chapter 12 The Historical Novel of Whiteness
- Chapter 13 The Unbearable Whiteness of Contemporary US Climate Fiction
- Chapter 14 The Twenty-First-Century White Life Novel
- Part III Approaches to Whiteness
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 14 - The Twenty-First-Century White Life Novel
from Part II - Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2025
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Edited by
Book contents
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Whiteness and National Identity
- Part II Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
- Chapter 8 Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Writing
- Chapter 9 Whiteness and the Slave Narrative
- Chapter 10 Passing in Modernist Literature
- Chapter 11 Whiteness in African American Writers’ Nonfictional Works
- Chapter 12 The Historical Novel of Whiteness
- Chapter 13 The Unbearable Whiteness of Contemporary US Climate Fiction
- Chapter 14 The Twenty-First-Century White Life Novel
- Part III Approaches to Whiteness
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Chinelo Okparanta’s Harry Sylvester Bird (2022) is unique in focusing deeply on its white narrator, Harry Bird, a boy from rural Pennsylvania who longs to be Black. As a twenty-first-century white life novel, Okparanta’s book shares with its postwar predecessors a profound engagement with the meanings of whiteness. Harry Sylvester Bird offers a relentless critique of the willed blindness and hypocrisies endemic to whiteness. However, while earlier white life novels largely presented characters who are at ease with their racialized privileges as well as the violence that make such privileges possible, Harry Sylvester Bird tells the story of a young man who becomes disgusted by his race and especially by his bigoted parents. Okparanta’s novel is a powerful exploration of contemporary whiteness that demonstrates how the desire for Blackness is yet another iteration of the privilege and willed delusion endemic to whiteness.
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- Whiteness and American Literature , pp. 205 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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