Title: Jump at the sun
First published: 1994
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.
Subjects: African Americans in literature, American Humorous stories, Comic, The, in literature, Cosmology in literature, Folklore in literature, History, History and criticism, Humor, Humorous stories, American, Literature and folklore, Women and literature, Littérature et folklore, Récits humoristiques américains, Histoire et critique, Humor (grappigheden), American Authors, Afro-Americans, Roman, Folklore dans la littérature, Humoristische Kurzepik, Humour, Noirs américains dans la littérature, Comique dans la littérature, African Americans, Biography, Afro-Americans in literature, Hurston, zora neale, 1901-1960, American wit and humor, history and criticism
Places: Southern States
People: Zora Neale Hurston
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3515.U789 Z77 1994