Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-89 - Hardcover

Since the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, African-American women have produced many significant novels that grapple with the struggle for social justice. In this book, Melissa Walker offers fresh readings of 18 of these novels examining how they relate to the movement and to its failure to achieve educational, economic and social equality. Beginning with Margaret Walker's "Jubilee" (1966) and working through to Alice Walker's "Temple of My Familiar" (1989), Melissa Walker discusses all the novels of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker as well as selected works by eight other well-known black women writers. Walker analyzes the forms, thematic concerns and narrative strategies of the novels, and reveals the way in which the civil rights movement and the still unresolved conflicts over race, class and gender have influenced them.