Book contents
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- Introduction: modernism and beyond
- 37 Stein, Hemingway, and American modernisms
- 38 The Great Gatsby and the 1920s
- 39 Philosophy and the American novel
- 40 Steinbeck and the proletarian novel
- 41 The novel, mass culture, mass media
- 42 Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel
- 43 Ellison and Baldwin: aesthetics, activism, and the social order
- 44 Religion and the twentieth-century American novel
- 45 Faulkner and the Southern novel
- 46 Law and the American novel
- 47 Twentieth-century publishing and the rise of the paperback
- 48 The novel of crime, mystery, and suspense
- 49 US novels and US wars
- 50 Science fiction
- 51 Female genre fiction in the twentieth century
- 52 Children's novels
- 53 The American novel and the rise of the suburbs
- 54 The Jewish great American novel
- 55 The Beats and the 1960s
- 56 Literary feminisms
- 57 Reimagining genders and sexualities
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
42 - Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel
from PART THREE - MODERNISM AND BEYOND
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- Introduction: modernism and beyond
- 37 Stein, Hemingway, and American modernisms
- 38 The Great Gatsby and the 1920s
- 39 Philosophy and the American novel
- 40 Steinbeck and the proletarian novel
- 41 The novel, mass culture, mass media
- 42 Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel
- 43 Ellison and Baldwin: aesthetics, activism, and the social order
- 44 Religion and the twentieth-century American novel
- 45 Faulkner and the Southern novel
- 46 Law and the American novel
- 47 Twentieth-century publishing and the rise of the paperback
- 48 The novel of crime, mystery, and suspense
- 49 US novels and US wars
- 50 Science fiction
- 51 Female genre fiction in the twentieth century
- 52 Children's novels
- 53 The American novel and the rise of the suburbs
- 54 The Jewish great American novel
- 55 The Beats and the 1960s
- 56 Literary feminisms
- 57 Reimagining genders and sexualities
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
In New Masses Richard Wright reviewed Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and observed, “The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought … She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.” In the Saturday Review of Literature Hurston responded in kind six months later, characterizing Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938) as “a book about hatreds … His stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live … Since the author is himself a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing … Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf.” The polarity of writerly visions implied in these reviews provides a useful way of examining the contentious issues of appropriate racial representation and artistic choice engaging African American novelists from the 1920s to the 1950s. Wright's concern with a white audience reveals the tremendous pressure placed on writers to portray the race in a “proper” light; Hurston's mention of Wright's awkward dialect shows respect for indigenous black forms as legitimate sources for literary art. One vision stresses the imperative of literature to transform social opinion; the other, the imperative to be true to cultural spirit; and both stress the need to adopt and adapt strategies to craft a literature revealing the worth of black existence and the beauty of black art.
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- The Cambridge History of the American Novel , pp. 700 - 717Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011