SOURCE: Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Hunter Austin's Ethnographic Fiction: New Modernist Narratives.” In Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings, edited by Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson, pp. 44-58. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Harrison investigates the influence of anthropological concepts developed by Franz Boas and his contemporaries on the narrative strategy of Hurston and Mary Hunter Austin.

As twentieth-century “regional” or “ethnic” writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Hunter Austin have suffered from a neglect of their literary strategies in favor of an analysis of the cultural context of their narratives. By focusing on the incorporation of this content, we might reconsider the place of each author in the modernist American canon. Far from simply recording or romanticizing “primitive” African and Native American cultures, these two authors critique the relationships among narrator, subject, and audience, and construct complex narrative structures...