Alice
Walker’s : The Color Purple : A Reader’s Companion/edited by Nandita Sinha.
New Delhi, Asia Book Club, 2002, 256 p., $28. ISBN 81-7851-007-3.Alice
Walker’s : The Color Purple : A Reader’s Companion/edited by Nandita Sinha.
New Delhi, Asia Book Club, 2002, 256 p., $28. ISBN 81-7851-007-3.
Contents: Introduction/Nandita Sinha. 1. Alice Walker: biography and works. 2. Background to African American writing. 3. Black feminism and Alice Walker’s womanism. 4. Reviews. 5. Ideas and themes. 6. The Color Purple: a summary. 7. A critical commentary. 8. Form and style. 9. Critical reception. 10. Alice Walker: an African-American Womanist writer/Kashinath Ranveer. 11. Alice Walker’s decolonization of traditional love in The Color Purple/Seodial Deena. 12. The Color Purple: the sense of the self and black American heritage/Sunitha Diwakar. 13. Politics and personal aesthetics in The Color Purple/Rajalakshmi Gopalan. 14. Self-realization and search for identity in The Color Purple/Rashmi Gaur. 15. The Color Purple: a womanist Novel/Krishna Mohan Mishra. 16. The Color Purple: a black feminist discourse/Mukul Sengupta. 17. Not beyond loving: a re-vision of the Lesbian principle in The Color Purple/Chandra Chatterjee. 18. Towards total freedom: a study of The Color Purple/Indira Bhatt. 19. From the verbal to the visual: Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple/Somdatta Mandal. 20. Re-organizing the lives of women: Toni Morrison’s beloved and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple/Madhumalati Adhikari. 21. Search for sisterhood: a comparative analysis of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Shanta Gokhale’s Rita Welinkar/Bhagyashree S. Varma.
"Alice Walker stands as one of the most significant contemporary black American women writers and a pioneering literary figure. Her focus in her poetry, essays, short stories, novels, documentaries and feature films has been on feminist issues within the black community. She has also been a courageous spokesperson on issues that affect women worldwide, particularly male oppression through female circumcision. She has won many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple, the first African-American to win the Prize. The present book offers a detailed study of Alice Walker as a novelist, focusing on her novel The Color Purple. Divided into two sections, it has a unique framework. The first section introduces Alice Walker, with an exhaustive commentary on the novel The Color Purple by the editor Nandita Sinha; the second section contains scholarly articles by eminent critics on various aspects of the novel. The book, it is hoped, will be of immense value to the students and scholars of Afro-American literature, social history and women’s studies." (jacket)