The Color Purple Contents
- The Color Purple: Social and political context
- The Color Purple: Religious and philosophical context
- The Color Purple: Literary context
- Textual help
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The Color Purple: Critical approaches
Generic readings
A literary text can be read from many different perspectives with different, sometimes conflicting, interpretations about its genre or what critical school of theory the work best fits. The Color Purple spans a number of literary styles and scholars and critics continue to debate its generic identity, variously describing the work as:
- A modern slave narrative
- An historical novel
- A utopian novel
- A folk tale
- A romance
- An epistolary novel.
Walker herself has described The Color Purple simply as a ‘book about God’.
A French word meaning type or class. A major division of type or style in an art-form. A sub-genre is a lesser division. The main literary genres are novel, short story, comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric.
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