The Color Purple as Bildungsroman

In this lecture, we think about The Color Purple as a Bildungsroman, i.e. a novel focused on the growth of a character from childhood to adulthood, focused in particular on: (i) the earliest Bildungsroman - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96) - and some other famous examples of Bildungromans: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-50), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); (ii) the traditional narrative structure of a Bildungsroman; (iii) the unconventionality as Bildungsromans of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1972); (iv) the extent to which The Color Purple is a traditional Bildungsroman; and (v) the extent to which The Colour Purple should be read as a (neo-)slave narrative.
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This clip is part of a larger course exploring Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple: massolit.io/courses/walker-the-color-purple?source=yt
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