New Books In Literary Studies

"It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” This line from Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures what is at the heart of all great literature: the irrepressible urge to speak, to be heard and understood. I spoke with Professor Deborah Plant, a scholar of African-American literature and culture, an expert on Hurston, and the editor of Hurston’s posthumously published Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo". When I asked Deborah about this sentence, how Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God could fear misunderstanding more than death, she gently corrected me. Janie no longer feared death even before this pivotal scene, Deborah explained. Deborah also corrected me, again gently but firmly, when I misspoke and suggested that Hurston had been largely forgotten between 1937, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published and she was still a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and the book’s renewed popularity starting in the mid-1970s. "Their Eye