Plum Bun Review

Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset is an interesting little (long) novel for a number of reasons. The most pertinent are the negative reviews that Plum Bun and Fauset's work in general received post Harlem Renaissance. During the late '80s and '90s during the resurgence of interest in African American writing and the diligent work of black women literary critics, the work has taken on a different context and possible meaning. Plum Bun is often labeled as a passing novel, but I, along with the critics I just mentioned believe that it is much more than this specialized form. Written at the height of the modernism and the changing atmosphere of the world, it is a treatise on the shifting "visuality" of the modern city and the capitalist motivations that a young, black woman living within that city must traverse and employ in search of happiness. i would place her novel right there beside the work of Jean Rhys in Good Morning, Midnight and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Now I just need to prove it for my paper I am presenting the end of March at a conference :-).