Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy - Hardcover

Lowe, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 025202110X ISBN 13: 9780252021107

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'Impressive....Traces the multi-faceted influences of Hurston's concept of comedy from its origins, especially in African-American humor, in other cultural sources, and in her particular world view.'--Kathryn Seidel, Mississippi Quarterly

About the Author:

John Lowe is an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 025202110X
• ISBN 13: 9780252021107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 373