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Jump at the sun cover
1994•373 pages•Published•ENG•User Reviews

Jump at the sun

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About This Book

For the writer/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, humor offered "a way out of no way," helping African American culture survive the harsh realities of life. The humor in Hurston's writing was a vehicle for subversive observations on intolerable conditions, yet it also provided a joyous commentary on the paradoxically creative and exuberant folk culture of an oppressed people. John Lowe explores the comic elements of Hurston's fiction in the first book-length critical study to draw on her entire body of work. Tracing connections between Hurston's life and the cultural, historical, and literary events that affected her, Lowe reveals the sources of her humor and its serious purposes by using social science humor theory, American studies, feminist theory, Bakhtin, and close readings of Hurston's fiction, nonfiction, manuscripts, and letters. Lowe also shows how Hurston balanced her levity with a resonant cosmic language drawn largely from African and African American religious imagery.

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African Americans in literatureAmerican Humorous storiesComic, The, in literatureCosmology in literatureFolklore in literatureHistoryHistory and criticismHumorHumorous stories, AmericanLiterature and folkloreWomen and literatureLittérature et folklore

The Swinging Light

Book Details

First Published

1994

Pages

373 pages

Rating

0.0 / 5

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0

Editions

1

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Language

ENG

Status

Published

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Authors

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