A Study Of Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Color Purple And Song Of Solomon In The Light Of Biblical Intertextuality

Gérard Genette is considered as the representative of intertextuality in narrow sense. Hecame up with the concept of “transtextuality” which can be classified into five types:intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality and architextuality. Taking theBible as pre-text, this thesis will apply three types in Genette’s intertextuality to study thethree famous African-American women writers’ novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God, TheColor Purple and Song of Solomon.The three African-American women writers, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and ToniMorrison, although belong to the different generations, yet they share the similar livingbackgrounds and writing patterns. What’s more, all the three women writers’ works are deeplyinfluenced by the African-American religious traditions, that is, they are all connected withthe Bible in a way in the aspects of contents and styles. This thesis will explore and discussthe traditional inheritance and development of the three black women writers and their worksin the light of biblical intertextuality.The thesis can be divided into six parts: the first part “Introduction” mainly covers theoverview of the three African-American women writers, the literature review of theirrespective three novels at home and abroad, the significance of the study and the structure ofthe thesis. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the theory of intertextuality both from broadsense and narrow sense. Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main body ofthe thesis, delineating the biblical paradigms (Exodus, Epistle and Canticle) implicated in thethree novels. The last part is the “Conclusion” which concludes the whole thesis and pointsout the main idea of the thesis. In the meantime, it states the deficiency and suggestions forthe improvement and further study.