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This book presents the way in which African American women writers (Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison) have followed the spiritual endeavor of black Christianity as created by early nineteenth-century spiritual narratives to construct a sacred reading of the black female self. The sacred femininity that puts the ethics and aesthetics of African American women at the center of a certain mode of (African) Americanness relies on a view of spirituality that joins women ontologically and validates affective modes of representation as an innovative means to obtain social and personal empowerment.
Examines the intricate relationships between time and gender in the novels of five fin-de-siecle British writers--Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, Sarah Grand, and Mona Caird.
This collection of essays critically interrogates Toni Morrison's use of the Bible in her novels, examining the ways in which the author plays on the original text to raise issues of spirituality as it affects race, gender, and class. Ideal for courses on Morrison or on explorations of the intersection of religion and literature, this collection treats its topic with sophistication, considering «religion» in its broadest possible sense, and examining syncretic theologies as well as mainstream religions in its attempt to locate Morrison's work in a spiritual-theological nexus.
Using private diary writing as her model, Catherine Delafield investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women's writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary-writing, she assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker. The ideological function of the diary, Delafield sugg...
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.
In a provocative new approach toward understanding transnational literary cultures, this study examines the specter of the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas. For Elizabeth Russ, the plantation is not merely a literal location, but also a vexing rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told. Through a series of precise, in-depth readings, Russ analyzes the discourse of the plantation through a number of suggestive pairings: male and female perspectives; U.S. and Spanish American traditions; and continental alongside island societies. To chart comparative elements in the develop...
Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, has been received with much acclaim by both the critical and lay reading public. Hailed as her best novel after the award-winning Beloved, most critics to date have concentrated on its setting in the late seventeenth century, a time in which, according to the author herself, slavery was “pre-racial,” a time before the “Terrible Transformation” irrevocably linked slavery to skin-color or “race.” Though a slender, easy to read novel, A Mercy is in fact a richly-layered text, full of multiple meanings and possibilities, a work of art that has only just begun to be “mined” for its critical import. The present volume is the first to deal wit...
Recent poems and fictions set in the early Americas are typically read as affirmations of cultural norms, as evidence of the impossibility of genuine engagement with the historical past, or as contentious repudiations of received histories. Inspired particularly by Mihai Spariosu’s arguments regarding literary playfulness as an opening to peace, Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature adopts a different perspective, with the goal of demonstrating that many recent literary texts undertake more constructive and hopeful projects with regard to the American past than critics usually recognize. While honoring writers' pervasive critiques of hegemony, this volume t...
Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-González, and Anissa Wardi In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on ...
Cutting-edge scholarly guide to Toni Morrison's most recent work with emphasis on Morrison's examination of African-American progress and leadership at key moments in American history.