Studies how Fauset, Hurston, and West used their writings to critique racial, class, and gender oppression. African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance tend to be divided into three aesthetic categories: the folk, which emphasizes oral traditions, African American English, rural settings, and characters from lower socioeconomic levels; the bourgeois, which privileges characters from middle-class backgrounds; and the proletarian, which favors texts that overtly critique oppression by contending that art should be an instrument of propaganda. Depending on critical assumptions regarding what constitutes authentic African American literature, some writers have been valorized and others dismissed. This book argues, though, that Harlem Renaissance literature consists of all three aesthetics intertwined, and that these strands cannot be arbitrarily separated. Furthermore, it notes that women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Dorothy West problematize the notion that a writer can fit comfortably into any one category. This rereading of the Harlem Renaissance gives special attention to Fauset, Hurston, and West.
It argues that all three aesthetics influence each of their works; that they have been mislabeled in the past; and that they rest on common ground in their efforts to challenge racial, class, and gender oppression. The introduction provides a detailed historical overview of the Harlem Renaissance and the aesthetics that prevailed during that period. Individual chapters then analyze the works of Hurston, West, and Fauset to demonstrate how the folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics figure in their writings. The volume concludes by discussing these writers in relation to contemporary African American women authors.