Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go and God’s Little Acre by Erskin

Chester Himes If He Hollers Let Him Go and Gods dinky Acre by Erskine CaldwellIt has long been contested that works of great Literature have accredited qualities and that they belong to an exclusive canon of works. Value is placed upon them for a number of reasons, including their reflection of cultural or social movements, the special meaning they possess, and even their practise of specific narrative elements. Up until recently, scholars and intellectuals would never dream of examining works of lower caliber with any hopes of discovering value or merit. A new movement indoors intellectual circles, however, has shifted focus onto so-called low-brow novels like Chester Himes If He Hollers Let Him Go and Gods Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell. Surprisingly enough, the works of Himes and Caldwell can be held up to the same tests as more canonical works through their appeal to ideological remnants of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, their use of literary devices to create meani ng, and the narratives use of these devises to fire the elements of enjoyment and pleasure in reading. According to the history books, the era of Romanticism and the subsequent Enlightenment have long since past, but their far-reaching effects are hush up evident in literature written in the 20th century. The importance of human merit and worth rooted in Romantic thought has transcended the jump of time and manifested itself in the novels of Caldwell and Himes through a preoccupation with what it means to be human. In Gods Little Acre, not only are readers prone to question whether or not the Walden family is subhuman because of their problematic behaviors, but the character of Buck remarks that God put us in the bodies of animals and ... ...e insight to life or contain certain meanings that the reader must reconstruct in order to evaluate the text fully. Other novels are considered to be noteworthy because they exist within a specific literary movement, or because t hey reflect cultural change. However much one might argue that Erskine Caldwells Gods Little Acre and Chester Himes If He Hollers Let Him Go belong at the bottom of the literary stack, they nevertheless employ the same concepts and exhibit the same characteristics that turn many otherwise novels into works of ideal greatness. Works CitedBrooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot Design & Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA Harvard UP, 1984. Erskine, Caldwell. Gods Little Acre. New York, NY New American Library, Inc., 1933. Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York, NY New American Library, Inc., 1945.