Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Hurston, Zora Neale - Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. “‘Fractious’ Mules and Covert Resistance in Mules and Men.” In Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 14-35. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.
[In the following essay, Meisenhelder analyzes the narrative techniques that Hurston utilizes to explore racial and sexual issues in Mules and Men.]
In an oft-quoted passage from her introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston stresses the difference between her childhood unreflective immersion in black folklife and her later understanding of it:
When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight...
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Criticism
- Cheryl A. Wall (essay date winter 1989)
- Mary Katherine Wainwright (essay date 1991)
- Kathryn Lee Seidel (essay date 1991)
- D. A. Boxwell (essay date winter 1992)
- Evora W. Jones (essay date March 1992)
- Rosan Augusta Jordan (essay date 1992)
- David G. Hale (essay date summer 1993)
- Myles Raymond Hurd (essay date fall 1993)
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- Nancy Chinn and Elizabeth E. Dunn (essay date fall 1996)
- Adrianne R. Andrews (essay date 1997)
- Elizabeth Jane Harrison (essay date 1997)
- Neal A. Lester (essay date spring 1998)
- Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
- David Todd Lawrence (essay date 2000)
- Laurie Champion (essay date fall 2001)
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