Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

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Possessing the Secret of Joy Summary
Alice Walker

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Possessing the Secret of Joy Summary & Study Guide

Possessing the Secret of Joy Summary

The central themes in Possessing the Secret of Joy fit together like a reasoned argument. Established first is a concern central to all of Walker's work: the subjugation of women. In this novel the focus is specifically on how ritualized female circumcision denigrates women's bodies, minds, and spirits.

The cataloguing of circumcision's horrific effects begins with the moving opening scene of Tashi as a young girl crying soundlessly among adults for her dead...

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Possessing the Secret of Joy Short Guide

Characters

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Alice Walker Biographies (8)

Alice Malsenior Walker

1,295 words, approx. 5 pages

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Alice Walker (born 1944) was best known for her stories about black women who achieve heroic stature within the confines of their ordinary day-to-day lives.Alice Walker... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

5,781 words, approx. 20 pages

Alice Walker is a talented, versatile writer from the modern South. Since the appearance of her first book in 1968, she has published poetry, fiction, and criticism, all of which have advanced her li... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

8,165 words, approx. 28 pages

Since 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited--"a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be... Read more

Alice (Malsenior) Walker

13,404 words, approx. 45 pages

[This entry was updated by Donna Haisty Winchell (Clemson University) from her entry in DLB 143: American Novelists Since World War II, Third Series, pp. 277-292.]Alice Walker knows firsthand the soci... Read more

Alice Malsenior Walker

9,879 words, approx. 33 pages

Biography EssaySince 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited-"a day when the unknown thing that was in ... Read more

Alice Walker

5,796 words, approx. 20 pages

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, as well as for its adaptation as a motion picture by Steven Spielberg, Alice Walker has become a totem for black feminism, what she c... Read more

Alice Walker

3,302 words, approx. 12 pages

Alice Walker was the leading English textual critic of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of her scholarship was undertaken to prepare for the editing of William Shakespeare, particularly the Oxford Old-Spelli... Read more

Alice Walker

10,204 words, approx. 35 pages

Walker was born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, about seventy-five miles southeast of Atlanta. She was the youngest of eight children, five boys and three girls, all of whom lived in a three-or... Read more

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Possessing the Secret of Joy SummaryAlice Walker

Possessing the Secret of Joy Summary

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Possessing the Secret of Joy Short Guide

Alice Walker Biographies (8)

Possessing the Secret of Joy Summary
Alice Walker