Content area
Full Text
Gloria L. Cronin. Critical Essays: Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 271 pp. $49.00.
Reviewed by
Deborah G. Plant University of South Florida
Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston is one volume in the Critical Essays on American Literature Series published by G. K. Hall, with James Nagel as General Editor. The volume on Hurston, edited by Gloria L. Cronin, is a collection of book reviews and articles which address Hurston's four novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); her autobiography Dust Tracks On a Road (1942); three collections of folklore, Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938), and Sanctified Church (1983); the play Mule Bone (1991); and selected short stories from The Complete Stories (1995). With the exception of two commissioned articles, the critical essays collected are reprints. These essays are framed by Cronin's introduction and a primary-source bibliography of published and unpublished materials compiled by Blaine L. Hall. The general editor's note purports this volume to be "the most comprehensive gathering of essays ever published" on Hurston.
Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston is organized chronologically, in accordance with the publication dates of the ten works addressed, and these works are treated in separate sections which contain reviews and/or essays. The section on Jonah's Gourd Vine contains only two book reviews; no critique of the work is offered. Three book reviews constitute the section on Tell My Horse. Their Eyes Were Watching God receives more attention, with three reviews and four articles. Ironically, although Cronin bemoans the lack of scholarly interest in Jonah's Gourd Vine and, along with other scholars, seems troubled by the "relatively little critical attention" that has been given to Hurston's other works, she helps to perpetuate the imbalance. In other instances, however, this imbalance is addressed, particularly with the inclusion of reviews and essays on Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee.
The discursivity determining the contours of Critical Essays derives from Cronin's perception of Hurston as a "feminocentric pantheist" who, "from her first novel to her last, . . . was engaged in a serious 'womanist,' ethnological critique of the social and political foundations of...