Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers

Essays discuss works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde, as well as Afro-American women’s fiction, poetry, and biographies in general, and the place of African American women in literature.

Introduction 1. Images of Black Women in Afro-American Literature : from Stereotype to Character (1975) 2. The Contrary Women of Alice Walker : A Study of Female Protagonists in In love and Trouble (1980) 3. Community and Nature : The Novels of Toni Morrison (1980) 4. Testing the Strength of the Black Cultural Bond : Review of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) 5. The Concept of Class in the Novels of Toni Morrison (1981) 6. Alice Walker : The Black Woman Artist as Wayward (1981) 7. Paule Marshall : A literary Biography (1982) 8. Afro-American Women Poets : A Historical Introduction (1982) 9. Nuance and the Novella : A Study of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1982) 10. Alternate Visions of the Gendered Past : African Women Writers vs. Illich (1982) 11. Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s Praise Song for the Widow (1983) 12. Creating a Universal Literature : Afro-American Women Writers (1983) 13. The Uses of History : Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Shadows Uplifted (1983) 14. Trajectories of Self-definition : Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women’s Fiction (1983) 15. No More Buried Lives : The Theme of Lesbianism in Audre Lorde’s Zami, Gloria Naylor’s The women of Brewster Place, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1984) 16. The Dynamics of Difference : Review of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) 17. An Angle of Seeing : Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1984).