Critical Insights: The Color Purple

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is one of the most celebrated and influential novels in American and African American literature, a rare winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction, and the inspiration for an acclaimed film adaptation and Broadway musical. In celebration of The Color Purple’s fortieth anniversary, this volume offers new readings of the classic literary work from biographical, cultural, historical, and spiritual points of view, with additional analyses devoted to art, adaptations, comparative texts, ethics, linguistics, masculinity, motherhood, poetry, and social activism and movements such as Black Lives Matter.