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Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Origins explores the multifarious ways in which memory works to conserve a legacy of the ancient past. The vestiges of both Classical Greek and Ancient Egyptian belief systems call to a concern with myths of regeneration.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.
Since its publication in 1992, Jazz, probably Toni Morrison's most difficult novel to date, has illicited a wide array of critical response. Many of these analyses, while both thoughtful and thought-provoking, have provided only partial or inherently inconclusive interpretations. The title, and certain of the author's own pronouncements, have led other critics to focus on the music itself, both as medium and aesthetic support for the narration. Choosing an entirely different approach for The Story of Jazz, Justine Tally further develops her hypothesis, first elaborated in her study of Paradise, that the Morrison trilogy is undergirded by the relationship of history, memory and story, and dis...
This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
This study deals with the formative powers of modern liberal ideas of private property. The liberal subject emerged with the formations of European liberalism, Atlantic slavery, and settler colonial expansion in the New World. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is thus identified as a key literary text that generates a fundamental critique of the connections between self-making and private property at its 17th-century scene.
"The growing heterogeneity of Asian American and Asian diasporic voices has also given rise to variegated theoretical approaches to these literatures. This book attempts to encompass both the increasing awareness of diasporic and transnational issues, and more ""traditional"" analyses of Asian American culture and literature. Thus, the articles in this collection range from investigations into the politics of literary and cinematic representation, to ""digging"" into the past through ""literary archeology"", or analyzing how ""consequential"" bodies can be in recent literature by Asian American and Asian diasporic women writers. The book closes with an interview with critic and writer Shirle...
Focusing on the lineage of pivotal African American and Irish women writers, the author argues that these authors often employ strategies of indirection, via folkloric expression, when exploring unpopular topics. This strategy holds the attention of readers who would otherwise reject the subject matter. The author traces the line of descent from Mary Lavin to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, showing how obstacles to free expression, though varying from those Lavin and Hurston faced, are still encountered by Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. The basis for comparing these authors lies in the strategies of indirection they use, as influenced by folklore. The folkloric...
" Generally held to be rigid, borders and categories are nonetheless expanded when those bounded by the demarcations of hegemony, challenge its strictures. Significant instances of this constructive transgression can be found in the women's writing with which this collection of essays by international critics engages. Whereas in travel writing by women (Sarah Hobson, Dervla Murphy, Jan Morris) `transgression' is seen to have settled into a familiar strategy, in autobiography (Ann Fanshawe. Margaret Cavendish, Christine Brooke-Rose), cultural analysis (Virginia Woolf, Marianna Torgovnick, Donna Haraway), and fiction (Michelle Cliff, Jeanette Winterson, Ellen Galford, Fiona Cooper), women have succeeded in creating an innovative space for themselves. "
This volume brings forward a descriptive approach to the translation and reception of African American women’s literature in Spain. Drawing from a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, it traces the translation history of literature produced by African American women, seeking to uncover changing strategies in translation policies as well as shifts in interests in the target context, and it examines the topicality of this cohort of authors as frames of reference for Spanish critics and reviewers. Likewise, the reception of the source literature in the Spanish context is described by reconstructing the values that underlie judgements in different reception sources. Finally, this book addresses the specific problem of the translation of Black English into Spanish. More precisely, it pays attention to the ideological and the ethical implications of translation choices and the effect of the latter on the reception of literary texts.
Offers the first queer reading of all ten of Morrisons novels. Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts radically intervenes in one of the most established and sacred topics in Toni Morrison scholarship, love. Moving beyond Morrisons representation of ghosts as the forgotten or occluded past, Juda Bennett uncovers how Morrison imagines the spectral sphere as always already queer, a provocation and challenge to heteronormativitywith the ghost appearing as an active participant in disruptions of compulsory heterosexuality, as a figure embodying closet desires, or as a disembodied emanation that counterpoints homophobia. From The Bluest Eye to Home, Morrisons novels have included ...