Alice Walker's Womanist Fiction : Tensions and Reconciliations

A theory formulated by Alice Walker, womanism focuses on the unification of men and women with Nature and Earth. This book explores womanism with regards to its specific concerns with African American women's rights, identities, and self-actualisation, and points towards its more overarching concerns with human relations and sexual freedom, as expressed in each of Walker's seven novels. Although Walker introduced the term "womanism" in 1983, this book traces the development of the concept across her canon of fictional works. By analysing the novels written in the 1970s, this book establishes how the term came to be coined, and demonstrates how womanism went on to be further developed and complexly wrought throughout Walker's literary career.