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Refusing the tragic pose: Zora Neale Hurston and the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance

Research Output:
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
Chapter
 Peer-review

Abstract

This chapter considers Zora Neale Hurston as a writer of place and space – place understood as geographical location, space as something more qualitative, mobile, and subject to style. Space is the significances and significations of place. Hurston’s importance to the cultural formation known as the Harlem Renaissance is examined, as is her intellectual continuity and discontinuity with Alain Locke. But though that contribution should not be ignored, Hurston is far more a writer of the south than the north (her interest in southern folkways is one source of split from Locke). The chapter follows Lindsey Stewart in reading Hurston as a philosopher of space and of the south, and it further argues that writing, for Hurston, is itself a space in and through which place is articulated – in and through which, that is, place is made to signify.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output:
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
Chapter
 Peer-review

Original language

English

Publication milestones

  • Accepted/In press - 27/05/2026

Publication status

Accepted/In press - 27/05/2026

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press, United Kingdom

ISBN (Print)

9781399561709

ISBN (Electronic)

9781399561723, 9781399561716

Chapter Number

10

Host publication title

The Edinburgh Companion to Place and Space in Interwar Women’s Writing in English

Host publication editors

  • Nick Turner
  • Nicola Darwood

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