Table of Contents -- General Editor's Preface -- Introduction:To Follow the Hero's Journey -- Rendering the (Womanist) Hero -- We Need a Hero: African American Female Bildungsromane and Celie's Journey to Heroic Female Selfhood in Alice Walker's The Color Purple -- Making Hurston's Heroine Her Own: Love and Womanist Resistance in The Color Purple -- Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Womanist Folk Tale and Capitalist Fairy Tale -- Theology of Liberation -- Rendering the African-American Woman's God through The Color Purple -- God is (a) Pussy: The Pleasure Principle and Homo-Spirituality in Shug's Blueswoman Theology -- Dear God… Dear Peoples… Dear Everything -- Witnessing and Testifying: Transformed Language and Selves in The Color Purple -- "My Man Treats Me Like a Slave": The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker's The Color Purple -- Alice Walker's Revisionary Politics of Rape -- Significance of Sisterhood and Lesbianism in Fiction of Women of Color -- The Classic Beneath the Polemic -- Homeward Bound: Transformative Spaces in The Color Purple -- A House of Her Own: Alice Walker's Readjustment of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in The Color Purple -- Adapting and Integrating: The Color Purple as Broadway Musical -- The Spirit of Space -- Alice Walker's Womanist Reading of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in The Color Purple -- Focalization Theory and the Epistolary Novel: A Narrative Analysis of The Color Purple -- Essay Abstracts -- About The Authors -- Index.