Identity Construction in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.91How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Maya Angelou; “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; identity construction

Abstract

Maya Angelou is a noted African American writer of seven autobiographies, which assured her a prominent place in American literature and she was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Among those autobiographies which focus on her childhood and early adulthood experiences, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is the first and best known. This paper aims to analyze Maya’s initiation through identity construction, to be specific, from losing her identity because of her abandoned experience and her ugly appearance to confirming her identity by the influence of grandmother Henderson and the boxing Championship of her people. It is hoped to provide a new perspective to appreciate the work and give some reference to the people who are on the way of identity construction.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhao Dongxu
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - Identity Construction in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 418
EP  - 422
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.91
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.91
ID  - Dongxu2018/12
ER  -