Literary Criticism
Kathy writes literary criticism exploring matters of identity and self-creation such as race passing, interracial friendship and literary self-invention. Her scholarship has explored figures and issues in American literature, African American and ethnic American literature, the Harlem Renaissance and biography studies.
“The New Negro Among White Modernists”
in A History of the Harlem Renaissance, Cambridge University Press
Yet for many of Harlem’s New Negro writers, friendships with whites carried precarious implications. While these connections provided invaluable access to publishers, patrons, financial opportunities and social power, they also required artists to navigate whites’ racially limited expectations about black identity, expression, and behavior….
Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank
As Kathleen Pfeiffer demonstrates in this fascinating new collection, letters also forge and record intimacy, serve as conduits for aesthetic discovery, and disclose moments of vulnerability when candor trumps the imperative to snip and shape.
— Mark Whalan, author of Race, Manhood and Modernism in America
Holiday, by Waldo Frank
Introduction by Kathleen Pfeiffer
Waldo Frank’s 1923 novel Holiday is the compelling account of a Southern lynching presented through a white author’s modernist, experimental style. Written by a white, middle class Jewish northerner educated at Yale posing as a black man while traveling with Jean Toomer.
Holiday offers a lively introduction to one of America’s most important forgotten authors. As Kathleen Pfeiffer’s introduction suggests, Frank’s novel also sheds needed light on one of the greatest mysteries of the Harlem Renaissance: the genesis of Jean Toomer’s classic Cane.
-– William J. Maxwell, author of New Negro, Old Left and editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems
Race Passing and American Individualism
Boasts a thesis as bold as it is compelling: race passing is not just a ‘legitimate expression of American individualism’; passing is American individualism. Through its attention to issues of genre, especially the connection between writing and identity, Pfeiffer offers a fresh perspective on some familiar American novels.
— Pamela L. Caughie, author of Passing & Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility
Literary Criticism
Books
Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank (University of Illinois Press), 2010.
Race Passing and American Individualism, University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
“Introduction” to Waldo Frank’s Holiday, University of Illinois Press, 2003.
“Introduction” to Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Critical Essays
“The New Negro Among White Modernists,” A History of the Harlem Renaissance ed. Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021.
“Questionnaire Responses.” Modernism/modernity 20:3, 2013
“Teaching Waldo Frank’s Holiday” in Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Course Design and Classroom Strategies ed. Michael Soto, Peter Lang, 2007.
“African American Literature” in The Encyclopedia of New England, 2005.
“White Novelists and the Harlem Renaissance” in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 2004.
“Nigger Heaven” in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 2004.
“The Limits of Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun” in Legacy, 2001.
“Individualism, Success, and American Identity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” in African American Review, 1996.
“A Comment on ‘Crossing Lines’” in College English, 1993.
"Summer and Its Critics' Discomfort” in Women's Studies, 1991.
Biographical Essays
“Edith Wharton” in American Writers Retrospective Supplement III, 2017.
“Bich Minh Nguyen” in American Writers Supplement 26, 2015.
"Arna Bontemps" in American Writers Supplement 24, 2011.
"Waldo Frank," in American Writers Supplement 20, 2010.
“Waldo Frank” in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction, 2010.
“Edwin Arlington Robinson,” “Wallace Stevens,” and “Dorothy West” in The Encyclopedia of New England, Yale University Press, 2005.
Book Reviews
Review of Utz McKnight, Frances E. W. Harper: A Call to Conscience (London: Polity, 2020) for American Political Thought (2022).
Review of Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance (Yale UP, 2012) for Modernism/modernity 19:3 (2012).
Review of Mark Whalan, ed. The Letters of Jean Toomer 1919-1924 (University of Tennessee Press, 2006) for African American Review (Fall 2007).
Review of William L. Van Deburg, Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life in Modernism/Modernity 13:1 (January 2006) 199-200.
Review of Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses by Thadious Davis in Studies in the Novel 38:1 (Spring 2006) 125-126.
Review of The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections From the Daybooks by Carl Van Vechten (edited by Bruce Kellner), for Modernism/Modernity 12:1 (January 2005) 202-203.
Review of Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism in African American
Review 32: 3 (fall 1998) 497-499.