975, scholars began to investigate the struggle for literary dominance that had taken place between a number of black male writers, advocates of social or critical realism in fiction, and Hurston's "mythic realism" with its "lyrical black idiom" (Gates 200).
             The resurgence of interest in this seminal work resulted in a situation where "within the critical establishment, scholars of every stripe have found in Hurston texts for all seasons," and the diversity of feminist approaches meant a diversity of approaches to Their Eyes Were Watching God. But Hurston's novel, aside from being the object of such analyses, is also the home and the source of several types of sophisticated critique devised by the author. In many ways, the diversity of approaches employed by the writer herself not only antedate but prefigure the diversity of approaches in feminist literary criticism today. There are also conflicts between certain aspects of Hurston's analyses that similarly prefigure the internal conflicts that characterize today's feminist criticism. A reconsideration of the use of feminist analysis in the study of the novel and of Hurston's critique provides illuminating commentary on the present state of feminist literary criticism.
             Of all the texts produced by women Hurston's novel is one that cries out most clearly for a multiplicity of approaches. It is not sufficient, for example, to approach it merely on the plainest of feminist terms or even in terms of black feminist criticism. The
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