Customer Reviews

Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West

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Excellent analysis of Jessie Fauset (The Chinaberry Tree; Plum Bun), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Dorothy West (The Living is Easy; The Wedding) - three, often underappreciated, female writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The vast majority of critical analysis and trumpeting of male writers of this important period of African American literature continues to reflect the gender, class and racial politics that these three writers explored in their fiction.

The author presents well-supported analyses of the short stories and major works of these writers whose prose documented the multifaceted experiences of class, gender and racial realities continuing to play out in American society. All three of these writers successfully integrated aspects of the folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics of black experience in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

The study "adopts a variety of critical approaches, including historical and feminist, in an effort to better understand the relationship between narrative technique and formal elements (theme, plot, character, symbols) . . ." The author deconstructs the plot and symbolism in the short stories and major novels, and discusses the life and milieu in which each woman found herself and its impact on literary output. The works of all three authors contributed in turn to the publication and critical success of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, opening the doors to a wider racial readership for these and other writers who followed.

It is a powerful irony that compelling literature continues to be subjectively dismissed for arbitrary reasons. To judge any work as being relevant only to a particular racial category, gender, political outlook, or socioeconomic class and ignore it as not contributing to or speaking to the wider society (which includes more than just a white middle class) only perpetuates the crisis that we find ourselves in today.