Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

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. ALICE WALKER'S: THE COLOR PURPLE Table of Contents General Editor’s Preface Introduction: To Follow the Hero’s Journey Rendering the (Womanist) Hero We Need a Hero: African American Female Bildungsromane and Celie’s Journey to Heroic Female Selfhood in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple Making Hurston’s Heroine Her Own: Love and Womanist Resistance in The Color Purple Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: Womanist Folk Tale and Capitalist Fairy Tale Theology of Liberation Rendering the African-American Woman’s God through The Color Purple God is (a) Pussy: The Pleasure Principle and Homo-Spirituality in Shug’s Blueswoman Theology Dear God . . . Dear Peoples . . . Dear Everything Witnessing and Testifying: Transformed Language and Selves in The Color Purple “My Man Treats Me Like a Slave”: The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple Alice Walker’s Revisionary Politics of Rape Significance of Sisterhood and Lesbianism in Fiction of Women of Color The Spirit of Space Homeward Bound: Transformative Spaces in The Color Purple A House of Her Own: Alice Walker’s Readjustment of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in The Color Purple Adapting and Integrating: The Color Purple as Broadway Musical The Classic Beneath the Polemic Alice Walker’s Womanist Reading of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in The Color Purple Focalization Theory and the Epistolary Novel: A Narrative Analysis of The Color Purple Essay Abstracts About The Authors Index