Domestic Abuse in the Novels of African American Women: A Critical Study

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The literary tradition begun by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s has since flourished and taken new directions with a diverse body of fiction by more contemporary African-American women writers. This book examines the treatment of domestic violence in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Love, Terry McMillan’s Mama and A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and Octavia Butler’s Seed to Harvest. These novels both reveal and contribute to societal attitudes about domestic abuse, while giving voice to oppressed and abused women.

The aims of this work are threefold: to examine how female African American novelists portray domestic abuse (and thus raise awareness about the problem); to outline how literary depictions of domestic violence are responsive to cultural and historical forces; and to explore the literary tradition of novels that deal with domestic abuse within the African American community - a tradition that was begun by Hurston in 1930s and has since flourished and taken different forms, thanks to the diverse body of fiction created by more contemporary African American women writers.