What is the literary merit of the book Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Question

What is the literary merit of this book by Zora Neale Hurston? I ask because my English teacher is assigning a lot of work for it and I would like to know if this book which previously I did not know of has literary merit. What is the philosophy behind the book and please give literary criticisms of it.

Answer 1

Zora Neal Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a very important and famous novel. It is one of the only ethnographies ever written that depict the life and times of African Americans as they define themselves socially and economically. The investigation into the black middle class struggle in America has never been explored in other literary works before Ms. Hurston took on the daunting task.

Answer 2

One of the strengths of Hurston’s work is that it can be studied in the context of a number of different American literary traditions. Most often, Their Eyes Were Watching God is associated with Harlem Renaissance literature, even though it was published in a later era, because of Hurston’s connection to that scene. Certain aspects of the book, though, make it possible to discuss it in other literary contexts. For example, some critics argue that the novel should be read in the context of American Southern literature: with its rural Southern setting and its focus on the relationship between man and nature, the dynamics of human relationships, and a hero’s quest for independence, Their Eyes Were Watching God fits well into the tradition that includes such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The novel is also important in the continuum of American feminist literature, comparing well to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. More specifically, and due in large part to Alice Walker’s essay, Zora Neale Hurston is often viewed as the first in a succession of great American black women writers that includes Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor. But Their Eyes Were Watching God resists reduction to a single movement, either literary or political. Wright’s criticism from 1937 is, to a certain extent, true: the book is not a political treatise—it carries no single, overwhelming message or moral. Far from being a weakness, however, this resistance is the secret of the novel’s strength: it is a profoundly rich, multifaceted work that can be read in a number of ways.


Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, long after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.
The literature of the 1920s, a period of postwar prosperity, was marked by a sense of freedom and experimentation, but the 1930s brought the Depression and an end to the cultural openness that had allowed the Harlem Renaissance to flourish. As the Depression worsened, political tension increased within the United States; cultural production came to be dominated by “social realism,” a gritty, political style associated with left-wing radicalism. The movement’s proponents felt that art should be primarily political and expose social injustice in the world. This new crop of writers and artists dismissed much of the Harlem Renaissance as bourgeois, devoid of important political content and thus devoid of any artistic merit.
The influential and highly political black novelist Richard Wright, then an ardent Communist, wrote a scathing review of Their Eyes Were Watching God upon its publication, claiming that it was not “serious fiction” and that it “carries no theme, no message, no thought.”
Hurston was also criticized for her comportment: she refused to bow to gender conventions, and her behavior often seemed shocking if not outrageous. Although she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and had published prolifically (both works of fiction and anthropological works), Hurston fell into obscurity for a number of years. By the late 1940s, she began to have increasing difficulty getting her work published. By the early 1950s, she was forced to work as a maid. In the 1960s, the counterculture revolution continued to show disdain for any literature that was not overtly political, and Zora Neale Hurston’s writing was further ignored.
A stroke in the late 1950s forced Hurston to enter a welfare home in Florida. After she died penniless on January 28, 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, another prominent African-American writer, rediscovered her work in the late 1960s. In 1973, Walker traveled to Florida to place a marker on Hurston’s grave containing the phrase: “A Genius of the South.” Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine, propelled Hurston’s work back into vogue. Since then, Hurston’s opus has been published and republished many times; it has even been adapted for the cinema: Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It, parallels Their Eyes Were Watching God and can be viewed as an interesting modern adaptation of the novel.

Answer 3

The same question comes up again

Answer 4

Good work getting people to do your homework for you.

Answer 5

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