A Journey To Selfhood And Self-fulfillment

Regarded as the first black woman writer to express the theme of black women's search for identity, Zora Neale Hurston has become an important precursor in black female literary history. She set the framework of black women's writing tradition for the later writers. Another famous black woman writer—Alice Walker succeeded and developed this framework from Hurston. While Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston in recent years are often linked together in discussion, few scholars have looked critically at what the two actually have in common. This thesis picks out the many ways that Hurston has influenced Walker and demonstrates how Walker, by taking the soul of Hurston and making it live in her own works. The Methodology of this study has been based on textual reading and comparative textual analysis from a perspective of feminist criticism. This thesis intends to concentrate on resemblances between Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker's The Color Purple; and Walker's tribute to Hurston and black feminism and tries to find out the black women's writing succession in their works.This thesis is divided into five parts: the introduction covers the general information about two writers, their works and the basic information about the black feminist literary criticism and its basic principles. Part Two mainly pays attention to the analysis of the theme in both novels: the first point is writers' expression of their ethnic characteristics in their novels, which is further discussed from the distorted mind after long-time pressure and the idea of black is beautiful; the second point focuses on the black women's embodiment of their real position, which is further discussed from racial and sexual oppression upon black women; the third point explores black women's different ways to self-realization, that is their pursuit of their ethnic culture, tradition, self-value and their pursuit of self-fulfillment. Part three from the perspective of black feminist criticism analyzes the literary techniques used by both writers in order to understand writers' purpose of using these techniques for the expression of black women's writing tradition. Part four summarizes the influence and contributions both writers have made to the Afro-American literature and points out that the black women writers' creative passion is greatly inspired as they succeed the traditions transferred by these precursors.Through the comparative study of two writers' novels, this thesis finds that the commonness in the novels represents precursor's influence on the later writers; different solutions to the question indicate later writers' development in the aspects of the writing...