Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Color Purple," is one of America's major and most prolific writers. She is also among its most controversial. How has Walker's work developed over the last forty years? Why has it often provoked extreme reactions? Does Walker's cultural, political and spiritual activism enhance or distort her fiction? Where does she belong in the evolving tradition of African American literature?
"Alice Walker," second edition:
* Examines the full range of Walker's prose writings: her novels, short stories, essays, activist writings, speeches and memoirs
* Has been thoroughly revised in the light of the latest scholarship and critical developments
* Brings coverage of Walker's work right up to date with a new chapter on "Now is the Time to Open Your Heart" (2004), and discussion of her recent non-fictional writing, including "Overcoming Speechlessness" (2010)
* Traces Walker's lineage back to nineteenth-century visionary black women preachers and activists
* Assesses Walkers prose oeuvre both in terms of its literary and its activist merits and shortcomings.
Ideal for students and scholars alike, this established text remains an essential guide to the work of a key US author as it explains her unique place in contemporary American letters.

How do (im)migrant writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words and meanings wander from one language and one self to another? Do the psychic and cultural worlds of different languages split apart or merge? What is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? Usually described as "code-switches" by linguists, fragments of other languages have wandered into American literature in English from the beginning. "Wanderwords" asks what, in the memoirs, poems, essays, and fiction of a variety of twentieth and twenty first century writers, the function and meaning of such language migration might be. It shows what there is to be gained if we learn to read migrant writing with an eye, and an ear, for linguistic difference and it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Bringing together literary and cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory and history of migration, and with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, "Wanderwords" engages closely with the work of well-known and unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez and Junot Diaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chavez-Silverman and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato and Don DeLillo. In so doing, a poetics of multilingualism unfolds that stretches well beyond translation into the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly re-connecting with the world.

Since the late 1960s, American literature has been revitalised by the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros and Maxine Hong Kingston. An introduction to the study of ethnic American fictions organised into four sections, each written by a specialist in the fields of African American, Asian American, Chicano/a and native American literature. Writers are discussed in their cultural/political contexts and literary traditions (rather than as exceptions or as individuals, or on a generic basis).
The book highlights common themes in ethnic writing as well as specificities, and has extensive suggestions for further reading as well as a critical introduction regarding the concept of 'ethnic writing'. No competing titles - there are no textbooks, no beginners' books nor any systematised combination of ethnic fictions such as this - only edited collections on each area.

"Liberating Literature" re-examines the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; socialist women's writing of the 1930s; the emergence of the New Left; and the second wave women's movement and its cultural practices. This historical study of feminist political writing recognizes the profound influence and importance of African-American women's writing. It offers new readings of both familiar and neglected novels within the feminist canon.

Liberating Literature is, primarily, a bold and revealing book about feminist writers, readers, and texts. But is is also much more than that. Within this volume Maria Lauret manages to look with fresh vision at the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; socialist women's writing of the 1930s; the emergence of the New Left; and the second wave women's movement and its cultural practices.
Lauret's historicisation of feminist political writing allows for a new definition of the genre, and enables her to illuminate the profound influence and importance of African-American women's writing. Well-grounded historically and theoretically, Liberating Literature speaks about and to a political and cultural tradition, and offers stunning new readings of both familiar and neglected novels within the feminist canon. Reader and students of feminist fiction cannot afford to be without this major new work.

How do (im)migrant writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words and meanings wander from one language and one self to another? Do the psychic and cultural worlds of different languages split apart or merge? What is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? Usually described as "code-switches" by linguists, fragments of other languages have wandered into American literature in English from the beginning. Wanderwords asks what, in the memoirs, poems, essays, and fiction of a variety of twentieth and twenty first century writers, the function and meaning of such language migration might be. It shows what there is to be gained if we learn to read migrant writing with an eye, and an ear, for linguistic difference and it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Bringing together literary and cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory and history of migration, and with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, Wanderwords engages closely with the work of well-known and unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez and Junot Diaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chavez-Silverman and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato and Don DeLillo. In so doing, a poetics of multilingualism unfolds that stretches well beyond translation into the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly re-connecting with the world.