Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its folk cultures while continuously moving back and forth between their Southern homes and Northern big cities. I argue that the two writers' mobility and their personal friendship enabled them to present the South from the Depression through the post-war years not necessarily as a site of racial oppression and segregation but as a type of contact zone where people with different cultural backgrounds meet and interact. Pairing the representative work of Hurston and Rawlings in each chapter, I examine how each text depict different shades of cultural contact zones found and created in the contemporary South despite of segregation and rigid social boundaries.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D. in English

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2013

Author dc:creator

• Hearn, Kyoko Shoji

Contributors dc:contributor

• Annette Trefzer
• Kirsten Dellinger
• Jaime L. Harker

• 20th Century
• African American Literature
• American Literature
• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
• Southern Literature
• Zora Neale Hurston

Repository record dc:identifier

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/552

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:egrove.olemiss.edu:etd-1551