5 Exploding the Hurston Boom

Abstract

Sorensen reads the reception of Hurston with particular attention to critical challenges to her current established place in African American literary history. Rather than seeing such challenges as threats to Hurston’s standing, he argues that they are signs of a successful recovery and that even a successfully recovered author might not fully escape the constraints that limited her expression and agency in the past. Exploring Alice Walker’s essays on Hurston in tandem with critical debates in Hurston studies, Sorensen shows that recoveries fragment their objects instead of producing perfectly coherent versions of them. Sorensen also draws on critiques of historicism emerging from medieval studies to show that the problem of recovery is not exclusive to multicultural literary studies.