Catapulted to fame in 1982 with the publication of her third novel—the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple—Alice Walker has become one of America’s most celebrated and divisive authors. With books such as Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker’s writing has frequently been cited for messages in support of civil rights and feminism. Above all, however, Walker is a spiritual seeker. Her works are dominated by the search for truth, wholeness, and the spirit that connects everyone and everything. In Alice Walker’s Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit, Nagueyalti Warren examines the philosophy and worldview present in all of Walker’s writing. Warren contends that Walker is a literary theologian, citing the transformative changes that take place in the author’s fictional characters. Warren also points to Walker’s bravery in approaching taboo subjects, her generosity of spirit, and her love for humanity, which are represented throughout her poems, novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. This analysis is further supplemented by primary sources from Walker’s unpublished material, including notes and scrapbooks. By exploring the spirituality evident throughout the author’s work, this volume shows how Walker challenges readers to recognize and understand their responsibility to the earth—and to one another. Providing a fresh, accessible look at one of the twentieth century’s most prolific women writers, Alice Walker’s Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit will appeal to both academics and fans of the author’s varied literature.

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender. Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

Volume of literary criticism concerning the works of author Alice Walker.

Bringing a black Atlantic approach to constructive postmodern efforts to understand and transcend modern worldviews and modern world orders, Mothership Connections draws upon the work of scholars in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles H. Long, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne. The author shows that connections to the originating influences of transatlantic slavery and black Atlantic experiences are essential to any adequate account of modernity and postmodernity. He also argues that metaphysics is essential to theology and moral theory, synthesizing neoclassical metaphysics and black theology to develop a black Atlantic account of metaphysical aspects of struggle, power, and ethical deliberation.

Dancing With God is an exploration of the divine gifts of courage and grace in the face of evil. Moreover, it is a doctrine of God as the source of that courage. Baker-Fletcher presents an understanding of the work of the Trinity with regard to the problem of crucifixion, a metaphor she uses for unnecessary violence. She develops a process of relational, womanist theology that considers the empathetic omnipresence of God in the midst of unnecessary suffering and the healing power of God in movement of the Holy Spirit. She engages the contributions of a diversity of theologians like Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Gordon Kaufman, John Cobb, Jr., Majorie Suchocki, Charles Hartshorne, Andrew Sung Park, and Katie Cannon in her discussion of the dance of the Trinity in creation, and the problem of sin, evil, and suffering. Through creative works like that of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and journalist Joyce King's account of the James Byrd, Jr. murder in Jasper County, Texas, Baker-Fletcher reveals the healing, encouraging power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of survivors of unnecessary violence.

• A celebration of the journey of African-American women toward a new spirituality grounded in social awareness, black American tradition, metaphysics, and heightened creativity. • Features illuminating insights from Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Dolores Kendrick, Sonia Sanchez, Michele Gibbs, Geraldine McIntosh, Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Namonyah Soipan. • By a widely published scholar, poet, and activist who has been interviewed by the press, television, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered From the last part of the twentieth century through today, African-American women have experienced a revival of spirituality and creative force, fashioning a uniquely African-American way to connect with the divine. In Soul Talk, Akasha Gloria Hull examines this multifaceted spirituality that has both fostered personal healing and functioned as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice. Through fascinating and heartfelt conversations with some of today's most creative and powerful women--women whose spirituality encompasses, among others, traditional Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American teachings, meditation, the I Ching, and African-derived ancestral reverence--the author explores how this new spiritual consciousness is manifested, how it affects the women who practice it, and how its effects can be carried to others. Using a unique and readable blend of interviews, storytelling, literary critique, and practical suggestions of ways readers can incorporate similar renewal into their daily lives, Soul Talk shows how personal and social change are possible through reconnection with the spirit.

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

Using Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy as his springboard, Peter S. Dillard provides a radical reorientation of contemporary Christian theology. From Heidegger’s initially obscure texts concerning the holy, the gods, and the last god, Dillard extracts two possible non-metaphysical theologies: a theology of Streit and a theology of Gelassenheit. Both theologies promise to avoid metaphysical antinomies that traditionally hinder theology. After describing the strengths and weaknesses of each non-metaphysical theology, Dillard develops a Gelassenheit theology that ascribes a definite phenomenology to the human encounter with divinity. This Gelassenheit theology also explains how this divinity can guide human action in concrete situations, remain deeply consonant with Christian beliefs in the Incarnation and the Trinity, and shed light on the Eucharist and Religious Vocations. Seminal ideas from Rudolf Otto and Ludwig Wittgenstein are applied at key points. Dillard concludes by encouraging others to develop an opposing Streit theology within the non-metaphysical, Heidegerrian framework he presents.

In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or "epiphany," in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains how the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

Since its publication in 1982, The Color Purple has polarized critics and generated controversy while delighting many readers around the world. Rachel Lister offers a clear, stimulating and wide-ranging exploration of the critical history of Alice Walker's best-selling novel, from contemporary reviews through to twenty-first-century readings. This Reader's Guide: - Opens with an overview of Walker's work - Provides a detailed consideration of the conception and reception of The Color Purple - Examines coverage of key critical issues and debates such as Walker's use of generic conventions, linguistic and narrative strategies, race, class, gender and sexual politics - Covers the reception and cultural impact of cinematic and musical adaptations, including Steven Spielberg's 1985 film and the recent Broadway production Lively and insightful, this is an indispensable volume for anyone studying, or simply interested in, Alice Walker and her most famous work.