Alice Walker's The color purple
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Alice Walker's The color purple
（Dialogue / edited by Michael J. Meyer, 5）
Rodopi, 2009
- : pbk
Available at 4 libraries
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple is a tale of personal empowerment which opens with a protagonist Celie who is at the bottom of America's social caste. A poor, black, ugly and uneducated female in the America's Jim Crow South in the first half of the 20th century, she is the victim of constant rape, violence and misogynistic verbal abuse. Celie cannot conceive of an escape from her present condition, and so she learns to be passive and unemotional. But The Color Purple eventually demonstrates how Celie learns to fight back and how she discovers her true sexuality and her unique voice. By the end of the novel, Celie is an empowered, financially-independent entrepreneur/landowner, one who speaks her mind and realizes the desirability of black femaleness while creating a safe space for herself and those she loves. Through a journey of literary criticism, Dialogue: Alice Walker's The Color Purple follows Celie's transformation from victim to hero. Each scholarly essay becomes a step of the journey that paves the way for the development of self and sexual awareness, the beginnings of religious transformation and the creation of nurturing places like home and community.
Table of Contents
General Editor's Preface
Introduction: To follow the Hero's Journey
Rendering the (Womanist) Hero
Brenda R. SMITH: We Need a Hero: African American Female Bildungsromane and Celie's Journey to Heroic Female Selfhood in Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Tracy L. BEALER: Making Hurston's Heroine Her Own: Love and Womanist Resistance in The Color Purple
Raphael LAMBERT: Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Womanist Folk Tale and Capitalist Fairy Tale
Theology of Liberation
Patricia ANDUJO: Rendering the African-American Woman's God through The Color Purple
Marlon Rachquel MOORE: God is (a) Pussy: The Pleasure Principle and Homo-Spirituality in Shug's Blueswoman Theology
Dear God . . . Dear Peoples . . . Dear Everything
R. Erin HUSKEY: Witnessing and Testifying: Transformed Language and Selves in The Color Purple
Courtney GEORGE: "My Man Treats Me Like a Slave": The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Robin E. FIELD: Alice Walker's Revisionary Politics of Rape
Uplabdhi SANGWAN: Significance of Sisterhood and Lesbianism in Fiction of Women of Color
The Spirit of Space
Danielle RUSSELL: Homeward Bound: Transformative Spaces in The Color Purple
Turgay BAYINDIR: A House of Her Own: Alice Walker's Readjustment of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in The Color Purple
Kathryn EDNEY: Adapting and Integrating: The Color Purple as Broadway Musical
The Classic Beneath the Polemic
Apryl DENNY: Alice Walker's Womanist Reading of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in The Color Purple
Ping ZHOU: Focalization Theory and the Epistolary Novel: A Narrative Analysis of The Color Purple
Essay Abstracts
About the Authors
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"