Understanding Alice Walker

"In Thadious Davis, Alice Walker has found an ideal reader, one who places the author and her work in personal, historical, and political contexts, one whose critical analysis reveals depth and meaning beyond the obvious, and one whose brilliance complements that of the writer."—Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

"This brilliant book provides a dazzlingly crystalline and panoramic portrait of Alice Walker's expansive body of work. It incorporates insights on Walker's biography, examining stages in her epic journey as a writer whose life and work have profoundly impacted the world and been devoted to helping its healing."—Riché Richardson, Cornell University

"Understanding Alice Walker is a succinct and searching study of Alice Walker's expansive corpus and evolving imagination. Thadious Davis provides her readers a comprehensive and illuminating overview of Walker's writings across multiple themes and genres, but also of the contexts—local and global—that have given it form."—Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia

"Davis reveals an immense scholarly patience with Alice Walker and her works, reading and discussing and analyzing them in a deep and well-organized reconstruction of the author's background against American history and events around the globe."—Geneva Cobb Moore, author of Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison

"Davis's keen attention to Walker's less critically engaged works is Understanding Alice Walker's greatest contribution and intervention. [. . .] Davis elucidates Walker's significant contributions to Southern literature, feminist theory, and Black Studies. [An] excellent companion text for courses engaging Walker's works as it is written to be accessible for undergraduate students. [. . .] Understanding Alice Walker reveals that Alice Walker's dynamic literary voice continues to be poignant and prophetic in both local and global contexts."—Studies in the Novel