SOURCE: “Cultural Valorization and African American Literary History: Reconstructing the Canon,” in Sociological Forum, Vol. 12, No. 2, June, 1997, pp. 173-203.

In the following essay, Corse and Griffin explore the process of forming the African-American literary canon by analyzing the critical history of a key text—Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Introduction

Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. It was Hurston's third book and made significant use of her work as an anthropologist and folklorist in its setting, dialect, and tone. Due to Hurston's stature as a Guggenheim fellow and minor figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the novel was reviewed in a range of publications. Their Eyes Were Watching God received mixed reviews, many of which failed to take the novel seriously. Sixty years after the publication of the novel, however, an amazing reversal has occurred. In 1990, Mary Helen Washington was...