Zora Neale Hurston and the Legacy of Black Feminism: Desire as Power

by Chielozona Eze, Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Editor), Jennifer Gustar (Editor)

Overview

The first extended examination into the structure of influence of Zora Neale Hurston's work on major Black women writers, an idea that has been widely accepted, this book explores Hurston's impact on such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Rita Dove, and Tracy K. Smith.

Focusing specifically on the concept of desire as a liberatory idiom and as the highest expression of self-consciousness and personhood, Chielozona Eze delves into the ethical and social assumptions of Hurston's aesthetics and feminist visions and their manifestations in the works of the Black women writers who came after her.

Through philosophical conceptions of desire, and zoning in on Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God and its protagonist Janie Crawford, Eze unlocks crucial conceptual and analytic trajectories regarding debates on freedom, personhood and Black feminism, and how such rich interiority appears in key works by Black women. Surveying fiction including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and The Color Purple, and poetry collections such as Life on Mars, The Body's Question The Yellow House on the Corner, Thomas and Beulah, this book is a remarkable intervention with important implications for our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350405677
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/08/2026
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women's Writing
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts.

Jennifer Gustar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research currently focusses on contemporary women writers, with special interest in writers of diaspora. She is North American reviews editor for Contemporary Women Writers and has published on a range of women fiction writers such as Anita Rau Badami, Bernardine Evaristo, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Knox.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1: Hurston and the Radical Nature of Desire
2: The Interior Life, the Self, and the Other
3: Self-Revelation and Community
4: Womanism: Desire as Care and Therapy
5: Desire and the Body as Our Home
6: Desire and the Radicalness of the Ordinary
7: Desire, Ecstatic Bodies, and Infinity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Refreshingly theorized and analytically astute, this book breaks new ground in Zora Neale Hurston studies. It offers a philosophically centered reframing of not only Hurston's life, career, and works, but also her influences on major black women novelists and poets.” —Christopher N. Okonkwo, Professor, Department of English, Florida State University and author of Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison.

“Zora Neale Hurston, a wildcard of the Harlem Renaissance, was frequently sidelined for her unorthodox perspectives on race and gender. In Zora Neale Hurston and the Legacy of Black Feminism, Eze explores the overlooked question of why, tracing these tensions to Hurston's philosophy and her focus on desire at the heart of the self. Meticulously researched, this book offers a fresh, essential understanding of Hurston's enduring legacy in Black female writing.” —Portia Owusu, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Texas A&M University, USA

From the Publisher