| Alice Walker, known as "dark-skinned Virginia Woolf", is recognized as one of the most prominent Afro-American women writers in America. As the first black woman writer who has won the Pulitzer Prize, Walker wrote in various thematic choices and profound themes. Apart from her profound sympathy for African-American people, she has been deeply concerned about the ecological conditions of the world and human civilization.Walker’s first work in the 21st century, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart is the most typical work representing her ideas, through which demonstrates her broad and profound ideas surpassing sex and race to explore the common themes of human, her deep concern for the ecological, social and spiritual problems in modern times, and her ideas about ameliorating the conditions of modern people in modern society by exploring the value of nature and human bonds.The novel best exemplifies Walker’s eco-feminist consciousness towards ecological conditions as well as human living status. Through the spiritual journeys of the characters, the novel reflects many concrete issues in modern times such as ecological crisis, social oppression and spiritual crisis, and more importantly, provides several solutions in dealing with these problems and crisis of modern people in modern society, which is the contribution of the novel as well as this thesis. The theme of being healed by nature is undoubtedly the predominant theme in the book, yet Walker also touches upon other issues including relationships between humans and nature, identity and religious crisis, and the seemingly hopeless current state of world violence. It shows her great concern to the environmental and spiritual crises and expresses her abiding obsession with the oneness of the universe.The Present thesis is composed of three chapters:introduction, body and conclusion.The first chapter is an introduction of the author and the book. The first part is an autobiographic introduction of Alice Walker including her life, works and achievements. The second part briefly introduces the main plot of the novel to be analyzed Now is the Time to Open Your Heart. The second chapter is the literature review of the book both at home and abroad, and the literature criticism-eco-feminism to be employed in this thesis.There are two chapters in the body part. In chapter three, the thesis analyses the various oppression such as ecological, social and spiritual crisis reflected in the novel based on eco-feminism theories. The oppression was created by humans over nature as well as over human themselves in patriarchal society, in forms of ecological crisis, sexism, racism, imperialism and self-identity crisis. And in chapter four, the thesis further explores the novel by analyzing various ways which the characters are searching for in dealing with oppression through the spiritual journeys for questing and healing, which exemplified the author’s great effort in providing various solutions for modern people in modern times in improving their living and spiritual conditions.Then the thesis comes to conclusion in chapter five. The thesis not only analyzes various problems of people in modern times in the form of ecological crisis, sexism, racism, imperialism and identity-crisis, and more importantly, explores four ways in dealing with the oppression so as to acknowledge the healing power of mother nature and the value of human bonds, which is rarely studied in the previous studies and also is the contribution of this thesis. |
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