New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God

Michael Awkward (Edited by)

9780521387750, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 January 1991

140 pages
21.4 x 13.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.21 kg

After decades of relegation to the margins of American literary history, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has recently been rediscovered by American literary and cultural scholars who have begun to explore the novel's thematic, ideological, and aesthetic complexity. In the introduction to this volume Michael Awkward provides an overview of the critical reception of Hurston's novel, from the largely dismissive reviews accompanying the novel's publication in 1937, to factors which helped revive interest in Hurston in the 1960s, to its recent establishment as a central American novel. The other essays in the volume discuss Hurston's sophisticated use of black folklore, the autobiographical resonances in the novel, Hurston's definition of the relationship between black artists and the Afro-American masses, and the usefulness of feminist modes of inquiry. This collection offers fresh insight for approaching Hurston's compelling exploration of a black woman's extended search for self and community.

Preface
1. Introduction Michael Awkward
2. The personal dimension in Their Eyes Were Watching God Robert Hemenway
3. Crayon enlargements of life: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as autobiography Nellie McKay
4. The politics of fiction, anthropology, and the folk: Zora Neale Hurston Hazel V. Carby
5. Power, judgment, and narrative in a work of Zora Neale Hurston: feminist cultural studies Rachel Blau Duplessis
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]