Inheriting And Developing Black Women Writing

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Alice Walker (1944- ) are claimed to be two of the most famous black women writers in the American literary history. Born in different periods, they never met each other. However, they display some common writing approaches and themes as a direct result of the social, economic and political experience they were obliged to share.Hurston's representative work Their Eyes Were Watching God used to be criticized severely for not fitting into the mainstream of black male protest novels. Nevertheless, since 1970s, after the reappraisal of a number of literary critics, it is now generally acknowledged as one of the classics of black women writing for its theme of black women struggling for freedom and searching for self-expression. In her representative work The Color Purple, Walker reproduced the theme, and continued to explore the ideal living state of black women. A number of scholars of African-American literature have initiated their efforts to further explore the tradition of black women writing through a comparative analysis of their representative works, among which Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple are given much more priority.This thesis selects the theme and the writing approaches of the two novels as its basis, trying to explore these two black women writers' efforts in inheriting and developing black women writing. By launching a brief analysis of the protagonists' struggling efforts to assert themselves, the thesis attempts to reveal Hurston and Walker's efforts in inheriting and developing the tradition of black women writing. Besides, the thesis makes a detailed contrast between Hurston's and Walker's female characters, and the writing approaches in the two novels, so as to display the differences between these two novels and point out that Walker has created a series of more realistic characters, and exhibited a much more harmonious living state of all human beings. In this way, Walker has not only inherited but also developed the tradition of black women writing.