Toni Morrison

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison is among our most distinguished contemporary novelists. Morrison describes herself as a "black woman novelist," and all her novels deal with African American characters and communities. Exploring the entire cycle of human life in a spiritual context, her novels are also universal in their depiction of families, especially mothers and their children. From her first novel, The Bluest Eye, to her most recent, Paradise, Toni Morrison has explored the African American experience, and by extension, the human experience. The characters she creates linger in our minds long after we have finished reading the novel. This is the only book-length study of Morrison's novels to discuss all of her novels published to date.

"Carmean's analysis . . . guides readers through the complex poetic metaphors toward their meaning. . . . Its annotated bibliography makes this book an important addition to academic libraries."—CHOICE

Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is probably the most widely studied work of contemporary fiction, both in the United States and abroad. The novel appeals to readers across various disciplines; as such, it is now required reading in courses in English and American literature, feminist and multicultural critiscism, and American history in universities and colleges around the world. The novel's universal appeal, with its unique structure and compelling story, has made it the subject of numerous scholarly essays published in reference journals. To make the best of these essays more accessible to university students, this book offers a volume of selected essays with a criticial introduction and annotated bibliography.

-- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature
-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism
-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

-- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature
-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism
-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

"Toni Morrison scholars as well as those interested in the creative process will be excited about a new feature that appears in this second edition of this book a sampling of Toni Morrison's creative process. In Part Two of this critical work, the author s"

Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination investigates Toni Morrison's Beloved in light of ancient Greek influences, arguing that the African American experience depicted in the novel can be set in a broader context than is usually allowed. Kathleen Marks gives a history of the apotropaic from ancient to modern times, and shows the ways that Beloved's protagonist, Sethe, and her community, engage the apotropaic as a mode of dealing with their communal suffering.

Apotropaic, from the Greek, meaning "to turn away from" refers to rituals that were performed in ancient times to ward off evil deities. Modern scholars use the term to denote an action that, in attempting to prevent an evil, causes that very evil. Freud used the apotropaic to inform his thought concerning Medusa and the castration complex, and Derrida found the apotropaic's logic of self-sabotage consonant with his own thought.

Marks draws on this critical history and argues that Morrison's heroine's effort to keep the past at bay is apotropaic: gestures aimed at resisting a danger, a threat, an imperative. These gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they seek to avoid -- one does what one finds horrible so as to mitigate its horror. In Beloved, Sethe's killing of her baby reveals this logic: she kills the baby in order to save it. Her action has ritualistic undertones that link it to the type of primal crimes that can bring relief not only to herself but also to a petrified community. As do all great heroes, Sethe transgresses boundaries, and such transgressions bring with them terrific dangers. It is through a series of these gestures that the heroine and the community resist whatMorrison calls "cultural amnesia" and engage in a shared past, inaugurating a new order of love.

Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination is eclectic in its approach -- calling upon Greek religion, Greek mythology

Throughout human history, motherhood and maternal experience have been largely defined and written by a patriarchal culture. Religion, art, medicine, psychoanalysis, and other bastions of male power have objectified the maternal and have disregarded female subjectivity. As a result, maternal perspectives have been ignored and the mother's voice silenced. In recent literary texts, however, more substantial attention has been given to motherhood and to the physical, psychological, social, and cultural dynamics affecting maternal experience. In Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, Paula Gallant Eckard examines how maternal experience is depicted in selected novels by three American writers, emphasizing how they focus on the body and the voice of the mother. These novels include: The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved by Morrison; In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns by Mason; and Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and Saving Grace by Smith.

By employingthis focus, these writers lessen the objectification the maternal has received and restore a rich subjectivity that foregrounds the mother's perspective. Moreover, their fiction reflects a deep concern for history and culture and for a woman's experience of her world. They challenge the traditional representations of black and white motherhood that have appeared in southern literature and society, rendering complex portrayals of motherhood that defy cultural stereotypes.

Eckard incorporates historical perspectives on African American and southern motherhood, utilizing the works of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Sally McMillen, Deborah White, Jacqueline Jones, and others. She draws upon the feministcriticism of Adrienne Rich, Elaine Showalter, Naomi Schor, Tillie Olsen, Karla F. C. Holloway, Barbara Christian, and others, and the linguistic and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.

This is the ideal guide for those studying contemporary fiction for the first time. The last twenty-five years have seen an explosion of new developments in the English language novel. Because of its enormous diversity, however, the field of contemporary fiction studies can appear complex and confusing. Jago Morrison's Contemporary Fiction provides a much-needed accessible introduction to the field. He enables readers to navigate the subject by introducing the key areas of debate and offers in-depth discussions of many of the most significant texts. Writers examined include: Ian McEwan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Hanif Kureishi, Buchi Emecheta and Alice Walker. Tackling issues such as history, time and narrative, the body, race and ethnicity, this represents an important contribution to the understanding of contemporary fiction.

On first consideration, Nobel prize winning African-American author Toni Morrison might seem to have little in common with Virginia Woolf, the British writer who challenged Victorian concepts of womanhood. But interestingly enough, Morrison wrote her masters thesis on Woolf and William Faulkner, and in that thesis, she gives special attention to issues of isolation. For Woolf, Morrison notes, isolation brings a sense of freedom that the attached can never comprehend. In her own novels, Morrison redefines Woolf's concept of isolation in terms of American racism, and both Woolf and Morrison examine the obstacles the female artist must overcome before she can create art. This volume looks at the similarities that link Morrison and Woolf together despite their racial, ethnic, national, and historical differences. At the same time, it analyzes how differing structures of domination define their art.

A critical examination of the Faulkner-Morrison literary connection.

Expounding the view that the feminist movement has both encouraged and enriched literature by women, Katherine Payant examines a large body of immensely popular but, for the most part, critically neglected fiction of the period from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, relating these writers and works to the women's movement and feminist theories. The study concentrates on popular fiction, which is seen as evidence of the widespread influence of feminism and as a vehicle for dissemination of "mainstream" feminist ideas. Chapters dealing with the 1970s and 1980s survey relevant feminist theories and tie them to representative novels. Chosen for special focus in individual chapters are Marge Piercy, Mary Gordon, and Toni Morrison, who reflect divergent perspectives on feminism. Written in accessible prose, this work will deepen the appreciation of readers of these novelists and increase their understanding of the effect of social movements on the arts.

The neo-slave narrative is an important development in American literary history and has serious revisionist intentions at its foundation. This book examines how contemporary African American women writers have shaped the genre. These authors have written neo-slave narratives to reinscribe history from the perspective of the African American woman, most specifically the nineteenth century enslaved mother. The writers considered in this study--Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler--explore American slavery through the lens of gender, both to interrogate the myth that enslaved women, denied the privilege of having a gender identity by the institution of slavery, were in fact genderless, and to celebrate the acts of resistance which enabled enslaved women to mother in the fullest sense of the term.

This is the first collection of essays in which African critics present an in-depth study of African-American writers. These prominent critics from different African countries and backgrounds bring an important perspective to the complex relationship between African Americans and Africa. Through provocative readings of prominent African-American writers, the contributors provide insights into contemporary African-American issues. This collection offers a rare opportunity to view African opinions on what it means to be African American.

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.

Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death, "almost unspeakable". She gives voice to -- or raises -- the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.

Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.