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The themes encompassing African-American writer Maya Angelou's seven autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou (1928–2014) is best known for her first autobiography, the critically acclaimed ''I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' (1969). The rest of the books in her series are ''Gather Together in My Name'' (1974), ''Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas'' (1976), ''The Heart of a Woman'' (1981), ''All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes'' (1986), ''A Song Flung Up to Heaven'' (2002), and ''Mom & Me & Mom'' (2013). Beginning with ''Caged Bird'' and ending with her final autobiography, Angelou used the metaphor of a bird, which represented Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and depression, struggling to escape its cage, as described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy". Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Their unity underscored one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to eat it. According to scholar Pierre A. Walker, all of Angelou's books described "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression".〔 In the course of her autobiographies, her views about Black-white relationships changed and she learned to accept different points of view. Angelou's theme of identity was established from the beginning of her autobiographies, with the opening lines in ''Caged Bird'', and like other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Her original goal was to write about the lives of Black women in America, but it evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her life. The theme of family and family relationships—from the character-defining experience of Angelou's parents' abandonment in ''Caged Bird'' to her relationships with her son, husbands, friends, and lovers—are important in all of her books. As in American autobiography generally and in African-American autobiography specifically, which has its roots in the slave narrative, travel is another important theme in Angelou's autobiographies. Scholar Yolanda M. Manora called the travel motif in Angelou's autobiographies, beginning in ''Caged Bird'', "a central metaphor for a psychic mobility".〔 Angelou's autobiographies take place all over the world,〔 from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, and span almost forty years, beginning from the start of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. ==Overview== The themes encompassing Angelou's seven autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. She is best known for her first autobiography, the critically acclaimed ''I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' (1969), which was nominated for a National Book Award.〔 Angelou did not write ''Caged Bird'' with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies; critics have "judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first".〔 Her series also includes'' Gather Together in My Name'' (1974), ''Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas'' (1976), ''The Heart of a Woman'', (1981), ''All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes'' (1986), ''A Song Flung Up to Heaven'' (2002), and ''Mom & Me & Mom'' (2013). Angelou's autobiographies have a distinct style,〔See Maya_Angelou#Style and genre in autobiographies.〕 and "stretch over time and place",〔 from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US. They take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.〔 According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's autobiographies have been characterized as autobiographical fiction, but Lupton disagrees, stating that they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.〔 Angelou's use of themes, especially that of racism, connects all seven autobiographies. One of her goals, beginning with ''Caged Bird'', was to incorporate "organic unity" into them, and the events she described were episodic, crafted like a series of short stories, and were placed to emphasize the themes of her books.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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