their eyes were watching Phillis Available to Purchase

Forms of what Nellie Y. McKay termed “sharing community”—seminars, study groups, festivals, dinners, intimate meetings, and more—are the backbone of print culture. Looking to Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God—brought back into print in the 1970s due to what Ann duCille terms “illicit bookmaking”—forms of informal photocopying and sharing have been key generators of critical interest in Black literary works. Chapter 2 uses the Black feminist critical history of Their Eyes as a methodology for reading Phillis outside of the mainstream British and American literary critical privileging of definitive poems or demonstrable facts at the expense of the importance of histories of critical desire. Indeed, this chapter turns to several critics, including Robert Hayden and Margaret Walker, who aligned with Phillis as figures who also could not be as transparent in their work as they might have wished.