Intra-family Relationship: A Mirror Of Black Communities In Southern America

Alice Walker is one of the most famous black women writers in the contemporary American literature, and The Third Life of Grange Copeland is her first novel in which she reflects her consistent themes of anti-racialism and anti-sexism as in her other major works.Starting from the analysis of how Walker reflects such socially-significant themes by incorporating the black mtra-family relationships in daily lives, this thesis concentrates on the exploration of racialism and sexism's spiritual destroy of the southern black sharecroppers. Meanwhile, Walker's adoption of the traditional black quilting form in plot arrangement and how it helps to highlight the themes are also analysed in this thesis.In addition to a text analysis on the novel, this paper also attempts to find out this novel's position in Walker's early writing stage and analyse its influence upon her later works especially upon her masterpiece The Color Purple.