"In Search of Satisfaction": Women's Choices in the Fiction of J. California Cooper

J. California Cooper has written six volumes of short stories and four novels. Despite the popularity of her fiction, no complete assessment has been done. This comprehensive, critical study is not organized chronologically but rather according to the psychological and economic choices made by the women characters. This dissertation explains how Cooper merges characteristics from the literary theories of Alice Walker's womanism, Clenora Hudson-Weems' Africana womanism, and from Abena Busia's description of the rebellious woman to illuminate the complexities of her characters as they struggle to make their own happiness, Cooper's personal directive to African American women.