San Antonio College Library

Nineteen reviews and eleven essays trace the critical reputation of Zora Neale Hurston's literary works.

"Various critics have concluded that Zora Neale Hurston simply capitulated to external demands, writing stories white people wanted to hear. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, however, argues that Hurston's response to her situation was much more sophisticated than her critics have recognized. Meisenhelder suggests, in fact, that Hurston's work, both fictional and anthropological, constitutes an extended critique of the values of white culture and a rejection...

"In Shifting the Ground, Rachel Stein adds a feminist slant to the rapidly growing field of ecocriticism. Americans have historically defined themselves in terms of their conquest of "virgin land." Unfortunately, this identification has often proved disastrous to groups such as women, Native Americans, and African Americans, who were regarded as nature incarnate, part of the ground that must be mastered in the name of nation." "From a perspective...

Features chapters on Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen. Also discusses other artists including Josephine Baker, Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Charlotte Mason, Bessie Smith, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer.

Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston are distinctly varying and individual writers of the American South whose work is identified with the Southern Literary Renaissance. This intertextual study assesses their autobiographical writings and their intellectual stature as modern women of letters. It is the first to include these writers in the socio-history of modern southern feminism...