Alice Walker's The color purple / / edited by Kheven LaGrone.

• Superior document: Dialogue ; 5
• TeilnehmendeR: LaGrone, Kheven.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Dialogue (Rodopi (Firm)) ; 5.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (347 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

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

Preliminary Material -- We Need a Hero: African American Female Bildungsromane and Celie’s Journey to Heroic Female Selfhood in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple / Brenda R. Smith -- Making Hurston’s Heroine Her Own: Love and Womanist Resistance in The Color Purple / Tracy L. Bealer -- Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: Womanist Folk Tale and Capitalist Fairy Tale / Raphaël Lambert -- Rendering the African-American Woman’s God through The Color Purple / Patricia Andujo -- God is (a) Pussy: The Pleasure Principle and Homo-Spirituality in Shug’s Blueswoman Theology / Marlon Rachquel Moore -- Witnessing and Testifying: Transformed Language and Selves in The Color Purple / R. Erin Huskey -- “My Man Treats Me Like a Slave”: The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple / Courtney George -- Alice Walker’s Revisionary Politics of Rape / Robin E. Field -- Significance of Sisterhood and Lesbianism in Fiction of Women of Color / Uplabdhi Sangwan -- Homeward Bound: Transformative Spaces in The Color Purple / Danielle Russell -- A House of Her Own: Alice Walker’s Readjustment of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in The Color Purple / Turgay Bayindir -- Adapting and Integrating: The Color Purple as Broadway Musical / Kathryn Edney -- Alice Walker’s Womanist Reading of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in The Color Purple / Apryl Denny -- Focalization Theory and the Epistolary Novel: A Narrative Analysis of The Color Purple / Ping Zhou -- Essay Abstracts -- About The Authors -- Index.