The carnivalesque blues of Zora Neale Hurston

This thesis investigates the Florida fiction of Zora Neale Hurston--Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948--using the Bakhtinian theories of polyphony and the carnivalesque as entry points into the texts. This thesis is also inflected with the theory of blues as posited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. This thesis attempts to show that Hurston's texts use anthropological recreations of dialect and folkways in order to recuperate the folk roots of African-American culture that were lost or degraded through contact with official white culture. Hurston's texts use the female characters as sites for this cultural recuperation through their entry into the African-American oral community.