A Study of religion and spiritual survival

The Color Purple is a novel which raised much controversial debate. However criticism has been more concerned with the social issues aroused in the novel rather than with its literary merits. The book therefore endeavors to demonstrate that beyond its social concerns, The Color Purple is a novel which preserves the richness of the spiritual life of the Black woman, through the religious experience it represents as well as through oppression and survival themes, as it is a novel of a profound artistic achievement. Thus, this book offers a reading of the technical strategies that testify upon the artistic value of the novel. Then through intertextual modes of analysis, The Color Purple is read as text which finds its theme and technique in other literary texts written by Black female writers as Phyllis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Brooks among others, who were all concerned with the spiritual life of the Black woman. This book may therefore be useful to students of literature as well as to all those interested in Women’s Studies.