Jump at the sun
Subtitle: Zora Neale Hurston's cosmic comedy
By: John Lowe.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
Subjects: Hurston, Zora Neale -- Humor.; Women and literature -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century.; Humorous stories, American -- History and criticism.; Literature and folklore -- Southern States.; African Americans in literature.; Comic, The, in literature.; Cosmology in literature.; Folklore in literature.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [341]-358) and index.