The research question of this dissertation is whether the Harlem Renaissance movement influenced the novels Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison and Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin and in which way. The thesis of the dissertation states that the Harlem Renaissance had indeed influenced the two novels albeit in different ways. In Ellison’s novel, we can detect the characteristics of the transition period of the Afro-American emancipatory process or, in other words, characteristics of the 1950s, though it is also true that Invisible man offers us the dilemmas that surfaced during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s, which is the thesis of the dissertation ‒ therefore, Invisible Man is the »unwritten novel« of the Harlem Renaissance. Go Tell it on the Mountain is the first and semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin and and it refers to his experiences with church ideology. Baldwin moved the time to which the novel refers to a few days before the Harlem Riot of 1935, which is the year we consensually mark as the end of the Harlem Renaissance that started immediately after World War I. The two novels, just as the lives of the two authors, are comparable, yet very different.
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