Meridian (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
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Meridian (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Alice Walker
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Meridian (SparkNotes Literature Guide) - SparkNotes
Meridian
Alice Walker
© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing
This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7852-7
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Contents
Context
Plot Overview
Character List
Analysis of Major Characters
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Important Quotations Explained
Key Facts
Context
Though Alice Walker has worked in a variety of genres, including children’s literature, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, she is best known for her novels, which give voice to the concerns of an often doubly oppressed group: African American women. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple, which extends and solidifies many of the themes she first touched upon in her early work, which includes Meridian. In many ways, Meridian anticipates and paves the way for Walker’s future preoccupations: it focuses on women’s lives and examines how the past and the present interconnect and construct the future. Meridian, Walker’s second work of long fiction, is set against the turbulent backdrop of the civil rights movement, which gained force in the 1960s, triggering sit-ins, demonstrations, and protests against the racist and segregationist policies that controlled and shaped the lives of African Americans in the South.
Meridian is in some respects autobiographical, but Walker and Meridian Hill, the novel’s protagonist, differ in many significant ways. Both Walker and Meridian were raised in rural Georgia and became pregnant as young students, though Walker, unlike Meridian, did not have the child. While Meridian’s relationship with her mother was fraught with problems, Walker blossomed under the influence