Zora Neale Hurston's Place in America Literary Culture
Author : Margaret Genevieve West
Publisher :
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 49,84 MB
Release : 1997
Category : African American women authors
ISBN :
Author : Margaret Genevieve West
Publisher :
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 49,84 MB
Release : 1997
Category : African American women authors
ISBN :
Author : Margaret Genevieve West
Publisher :
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 28,52 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813028309
Genevieve West examines the cultural history of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing and the reception of her work, in an attempt to explain why Hurston died in obscure poverty only to be reclaimed as an important Harlem Renaissance writer decades after her death. Unlike other books on Hurston, this study focuses on how Hurston was marketed and reviewed during her career and how literary scholars reappraised her after her death. While her publisher's approach to marketing Hurston as an African American fiction writer and folklorist increased her popularity among the general reading public, her fellow Harlem Renaissance authors often excoriated her as an exploiter of African American culture and a propagator of black stereotypes. Eventually, the criticism outweighed the popularity, and her writing fell out of fashion. It was only after critics reconsidered her work in the 1960s and 1970s that she eventually regained her status as one of the best writers of her generation. No other book has focused on this aspect of Hurston's career, nor has any book so systematically used marketing materials and reviews to track Hurston's literary reputation. As a result, West's study will provide a new perspective on Hurston and on the ways that the politics of race, class, and gender impact canon formation in American literary culture. This study is based on numerous interviews, short fiction previously undocumented in Hurston scholarship, an innovative analysis of advertisements and dust jackets, examinations of letters by and about Hurston, and the examination of historical/literary contexts, including the Harlem Renaissance, the protest movement, the assimilationist movement, the Black Arts movement, and the rise of black feminist thought.
Author : Stephanie Li
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 43,66 MB
Release : 2020-01-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
In this biography, chronological chapters follow Zora Neale Hurston's family, upbringing, education, influences, and major works, placing these experiences within the context of American history. This biography of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most influential African American writers of the 20th century and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, is primarily for students and will cover all of the major points of development in Hurston's life as well as her major publications. Hurston's impact extends beyond the literary world: she also left her mark as an anthropologist whose ethnographic work portrays the racial struggles during the early 20th century American South. This work includes a preface and narrative chapters that explore Hurston's literary influences and the personal relationships that were most formative to her life; the final chapter, "Why Zora Neale Hurston Matters," explores her cultural and historical significance, providing context to her writings and allowing readers a greater understanding of Hurston's life while critically examining her major writing.
Author : Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 34,98 MB
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1317777026
Hurston was renowned for her portrayal of assertive women in her fiction, folklore, and drama. This book explores her development as an assertive woman and outspoken writer, emphasizing the impact of the African American oral traditions and vernacular speech patterns of Harlem, Polk County, and her hometown of Eatonville, Florida on the development of her personal and artistic voice. The study traces the development of her assertive women characters, the emphasis upon verbal performance and verbal empowerment, the significance of down home Southern humor, and the importance of an ideology of assertive individualism in Hurston's writings and analyzes changes in Hurston's personal style. Hurston articulated an assertive spirit and voice that had a profound influence on the development of her professional reputation and on the course of African American literature, folklore, and culture of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This study combines literary criticism and biography in tracing her often controversial career. This wide-ranging book focuses upon links between Hurston's fiction and nonfiction, and includes analysis of her plays, which have often been neglected in studies of her writing.(Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York-Buffalo, 1989; revised with new introduction)
Author : Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 10,75 MB
Release : 2008-06-03
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0813542928
Collected plays of the African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960).
Author : Sharon Lynette Jones
Publisher : Infobase Publishing
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 24,92 MB
Release : 2009
Category : African American authors
ISBN : 143812693X
Zora Neale Hurston, one the first great African-American novelists, was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and an inspiration for future generations of writers. Widely studied in high school literature courses, her novels are admired for their depiction of Southern black culture and their strong female characters. Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston is a reliable and up-to-date resource for high school and college-level students, providing reliable information on Hurston's life and work. This new volume covers all her writings, including Their Eyes Were Watching God; her landmark works of folklore and anthropology, such as Mules and Men; and shorter works, such as her story The Gilded Six-Bits.
Author : Virginia Lynn Moylan
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 17,72 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780813035789
Moylan, founding member of the Fort Pierce, Fla., Annual Zora Festival, draws heavily on two texts (Valerie Boyd's biography Wrapped in Rainbows, and Carla Kaplan's edition of Hurston's letters, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters), supplemented by a number of interviews with the employers, acquaintances, and friends of Hurston's last decade. After a brief biographical sketch of Hurston's early years, Moylan addresses, the false child molestation charges that, even after they were recanted, left Hurston's reputation in tatters, and her very controversial (in Moylan's words, "eccentric") objections to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation on the grounds that, in her perspective, "racial uplift" would come by individual effort alone. Hurston's final creative projects-her development of an "anthropologically correct" black baby doll and planned biography of King Herod attest to how the famously idiosyncratic and iconoclastic writer remained deeply unpredictable and fascinating, and that her "lost years" merit a thoughtful and thorough biography
Author : Judith Fetterley
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 11,69 MB
Release : 2003
Category : American literature
ISBN : 9780252027673
"In a series of sketches, regionalist writers such as Alice Cary, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Mary Austin critique the approach to regional subjects characteristic of local color and present narrators who serve as cultural interpreters for persons often considered "out of place" by urban readers. In their approach to these writers, Fetterley and Pryse offer contemporary readers an alternative vantage point from which to consider questions of regions and regionalism in the global economy of our own time."--Jacket.
Author : Henry Louis Gates
Publisher : Amistad
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 11,40 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), earned comments ranging from "most vital" to "a disappointment," although the reviewers consistently praised her use of dialect and language. This unique collection includes reviews of Mules and Men (1935), the first collection of African-American folklore published by an African American. Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1973 novel that addressed a woman's desire for independence and individuality, was favorably reviewed by Alain Locke, the first Black Rhodes scholar and one of Hurston's professors at Howard University, and unfavorably reviewed by Richard Wright, who testily complained that the book was addressed to a white audience.
Author : Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 36,93 MB
Release : 2023-02-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0252054156
Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston’s literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston’s two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain’t I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.