Critical Essays on Alice Walker

by Ikenna Dieke

Overview

Alice Walker is one of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth-century American literature. This collection of essays represents a dispassionate scholarly effort to comprehend the essential elements of her prolific imagination, which celebrates women by chronicling their troubled jourbaney from silence to self-expression and from pain to resistance. The essays fall largely into three main groups, focusing on Walker's most famous and controversial novel, The Color Purple, on her poetry, which has for too long met with critical neglect, and on her ecofeminist novel, The Temple of My Familiar.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313300127
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/30/1999
Series:	Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets , #189
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Lexile:	1410L (what's this?)

About the Author

IKENNA DIEKE is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Primordial Image: African, Afro-American, and Caribbean Mythopoetic Text (1993) and of several articles in scholarly jourbanals such as African American Review and The New Review.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Alice Walker, Pygmalion in Reverse by Ikenna Dieke
Occupational Hazard: Loss of Historical Context in Twentieth-Century Feminist Readings, and a New Reading of the Heroine's Story in Alice Walker's THE COLOR PURPLE by Dror Abend-David
Heritage and Deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use" by David Cowart
Alice Walker's Womanist Magic: The Conjure Woman as Rhetor by Catherine A. Colton
When a Convent Seems the Only Viable Choice: Questionable Callings in Stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Walker, and Louise Erdrich by Margaret D. Bauer
Creating Generations: The Relationship between Celie and Shug in Alice Walker's THE COLOR PURPLE by E. Ellen Barker
Alice Walker and the "Man Question" by Pia Thielmann
Revolutionary Stanzas: The Civil and Human Rights Poetry of Alice Walker by Jefrey L. Coleman
THE COLOR PURPLE: An Existential Novel by Marc-A. Christophe
Alice Walker's Redemptive Art by Felipe Smith
Walker's THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR: Womanist as Monistic Idealist by Ikenna Dieke
Alice Walker's American Quilt: THE COLOR PURPLE and American Literary Tradition by Priscilla Leder
Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker by Ruth D. Weston
"Nothing Can Be Sole or Whole That Has Not Been Rent": Fragmentation in the QUILT and THE COLOR PURPLE by Judy Elsley
A Matter of Focus: Men in the Margins of Alice Walker's Fiction by Erna Kelly
"What She Got to Sing About?": Comedy and THE COLOR PURPLE by Priscilla L. Walton
Alice Walker: Poesy and the Earthling Psyche by Ikenna Dieke
Appendix: Chronology
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A collection of critical essays on the controversial work of Alice Walker. Themes include the conjure woman as rhetor, a new reading of the heroine's story in , the civil and human rights poetry of Alice Walker, and questionable callings in stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Walker, and Louise Erdrich. Also discusses as an existential novel, the naked self in Alice Walker, and men in the margins of Alice Walker's fiction. The editor teaches African studies at the University of Arizona. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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