Download or read book Toni Morrison and Motherhood written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces Morrison's theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory—a politics of the heart. "As an advocate of 'a politics of the heart,' O'Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values ... Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O'Reilly's methodical research on Morrison's works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison's works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison's rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition." — African American Review "O'Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences." — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering "Andrea O'Reilly examines Morrison's complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison." — South Atlantic Review "...it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author ... anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O'Reilly's exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison's works result in a highly useful scholarly read." — Literary Mama "By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison's literary world, O'Reilly conveys Morrison's vision of motherhood as an act of resistance." — American Literature "Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison's oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison's interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O'Reilly for illuminating Morrison's 'maternal standpoint' and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature." — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction "In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O'Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences." — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Download or read book Sula written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002-04-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Download or read book A Mercy written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Download or read book The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).

Download or read book Why I Hate Toni Morrison s Beloved written by Scott Bradfield and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays about the pleasures and perils of loving (and hating) books, places, and other people.

Download or read book Paradise written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book The Hitman s Daughter written by Carolyne Topdjian and published by Polis Books. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Château du Ciel was once the destination for the rich and famous to play, drink and ski—complete with a private railway to shuttle those desiring extra privacy—now, however, the guests are few and far between. The New Year’s Eve party was supposed to hoist the rundown hotel back to its former status, until a massive blizzard hits, trapping the guests who’ve come to celebrate the grand hotel’s last hurrah. The circumstances might even be romantic, if the hotel wasn't reputed to be haunted. When hotel employee Mave Michael finds the resident artist dead, and shortly thereafter hotel security finds Mave alone with the body, the reputation that Mave has fought long and hard to outrun comes back to haunt her. You see, her father is a notorious hitman who is serving multiple life sentences in prison. She has changed her name and location dozens of times, but he somehow manages to track her down—even sending her a postcard on the eve of her birthday, January 1st. She’s the perfect choice to frame for murder, and now the number one suspect. Mave can no longer deny the lessons in survival her father taught her, and calls on that and her uncanny sixth-sense in “finding” lost objects to navigate the maze of the hotel. To save herself, she not only has to stop running from her own past, she must unearth the history of the hotel, its elite guests and buried secrets—one deadly sin at a time. An homage to classic gothic horror, that proves that the ghosts of family and classism are alive and well.

Download or read book Recitatif written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla’s and Roberta’s races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? Morrison herself described this story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

Download or read book Home written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding himself--and his home.

Download or read book Sapphira and the Slave Girl written by Willa Cather and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willa Cather’s twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather’s Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery—conflicts in which Cather’s family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, “terrible.” The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel’s grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather’s life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather’s research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather’s composition process.

Download or read book The Black Feminist Reader written by Joy James and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2000-06-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements.

Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

Download or read book Membranes of Hope written by Theresa C Dintino and published by . This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The membrane is a permeable boundary with intelligence and discernment that allows in or keeps out that which it senses is appropriate for the lifesystems within it. Spiritual, etheric, or bioenergetic membranes encase and enclose lifesystems, from the cells in our bodies to the cosmos around us. They contain, protect, and inform our personal souls, families, villages, the Earth, and extend out into the universe. The role of the spirit worker has always been to tend to, support, and keep these membranes strong and supple so that what is held within them not only survives but thrives. In this book, Theresa C. Dintino defines this revolutionary concept and offers the reader tools to learn how to engage in this work at any level they wish to participate. There is no better time for this book and the work that flows out of it. Join the movement to care for and repair the membranes at their many levels to restore and maintain health in the lifesystems of the planet. Theresa C. Dintino is the author of eight books and serves as a guide and spiritual mentor to many. While attempting to reclaim and restore her ancestral medicine lineage, the Italian Strega tradition, Dintino was surprised to be "claimed" by the West African Dagara tradition of stick divination. Honored by this invitation, Dintino pursued it, and in 2011 was initiated into this potent form of divination. Besides her family and daughter, this turned out to be the greatest gift of her life. Stick divination helped Dintino find her way back to her own lineage and enables her to help others find and restore theirs. This beautiful practice of Dagara stick divination continues to offer countless gifts. In multiple divination sessions, Dintino was taught about the spiritual membranes that protect, nurture and inform lifesystems.

Download or read book Jazz written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Stories They Told Me written by Theresa Dintino and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an underground temple on the Island of Malta, Aureillia and Danelle witness a vision of the future that shocks and horrifies them, propelling them on to individual journeys of discovery. Danelle journeys to Africa. There, with the local shaman, he explores the heartbreaking questions of his soul. Aureillia returns to her home in Bronze Age Crete where the shock waves of a prophecy told long ago resonate in ways unexpected. Can they find a way to change the future that appears to loom inevitable? If you are interested in shamanism, the Goddess, gender reconciliation, or spiritual journeys of any kind, this is a book for you. Dintino weaves this multi-layered tale with such intensity and compassion, the characters emerge from the page and envelop you in the mesmerizing spell of their soulfulness.

Download or read book The Origin of Others written by Toni Morrison and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.