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

(Hardback)

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Studies how Fauset, Hurston, and West used their writings to critique racial, class, and gender oppression. African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance tend to be divided into three aesthetic categories: the folk, which emphasizes oral traditions, African American English, rural settings, and characters from lower socioeconomic levels; the bourgeois, which privileges characters from middle-class backgrounds; and the proletarian, which favors texts that overtly critique oppression by contending that art should be an instrument of propaganda. Depending on critical assumptions regarding what constitutes authentic African American literature, some writers have been valorized and others dismissed. This book argues, though, that Harlem Renaissance literature consists of all three aesthetics intertwined, and that these strands cannot be arbitrarily separated. Furthermore, it notes that women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Dorothy West problematize the notion that a writer can fit comfortably into any one category. This rereading of the Harlem Renaissance gives special attention to Fauset, Hurston, and West. It argues that all three aesthetics influence each of their works; that they have been mislabeled in the past; and that they rest on common ground in their efforts to challenge racial, class, and gender oppression. The introduction provides a detailed historical overview of the Harlem Renaissance and the aesthetics that prevailed during that period. Individual chapters then analyze the works of Hurston, West, and Fauset to demonstrate how the folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics figure in their writings. The volume concludes by discussing these writers in relation to contemporary African American women authors.

Reviews

[I]f any of us has ever questioned the centrality of Hurston to today's study of literature, this very good book provides emphatic positive answers.-American Literature
With this volume Jones remedies the relative neglect of Fauset and West, according them equal attention with the now-familiar Hurston. And in extending her discussion of Hurston beyond Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jones broadens the reader's understanding of this most famous of the Harlem Renaissance's many formidable women. Recommended. All academic collections, lower-division undergraduate level and above.-Choice
"If any of us has ever questioned the centrality of Hurston to today's study of literature, this very good book provides emphatic positive answers."-American Literature
"[I]f any of us has ever questioned the centrality of Hurston to today's study of literature, this very good book provides emphatic positive answers."-American Literature
"With this volume Jones remedies the relative neglect of Fauset and West, according them equal attention with the now-familiar Hurston. And in extending her discussion of Hurston beyond Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jones broadens the reader's understanding of this most famous of the Harlem Renaissance's many formidable women. Recommended. All academic collections, lower-division undergraduate level and above."-Choice

Author Bio

Sharon L. Jones is Assistant Professor of English at Earlham College, where she teaches African American literature, humanities, modern literature, 19th-century literature, and contemporary literature. She is coeditor of The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature (2000).