Download or read book The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison written by Terry Otten and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this ground-breaking study of Morrison's five novels, Terry Otten explores the mythic substructure of her fictions by tracing the pervasive motif of the biblical fall. The crime of innocence describes how Morrison recasts the fall from innocence as a necessary gesture of freedom, a felix culpa adapted to the demands of contemporary America. Employing biblical and theological elements, these novels suggest that no greater sin exists than innocence. In a fictional world where 'good' and 'evil' constantly shift, a fall is essential to an authentic life, however frightening the risks, however ironic the end."--Cover.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Fiction written by David L. Middleton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of contemporary criticism explores her concern with racial and gender issues and analyzes her in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction-making. These classics provide a broad look at critical argument about Toni Morrison's meanings and significance during the past 10 years. From the formative effects of learning one's Otherness as a result of majority perception, to the apocalyptic implications of racial memory, to the moral and psychologically constructive act of storytelling, to the structural function served by improvisational jazz music, to the imagery associated with both flight and naming, to the uniquely female experience of community-major issues raised by Morrison's body of work are explicated here.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Fiction written by Jan Furman and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.
Download or read book Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison s Fiction written by Mariangela Palladino and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction investigates Morrison’s aesthetics in terms of narrative’s ethical import. Morrison’s writing is concerned with ethically debatable issues and it offers a problematic representation of human experiences in African American history. Whilst previous critical studies consider ethics in relation to events in the story, Palladino explores its intersection with aesthetics. Narrativizing the moral law, Morrison’s imperative is to relate the past, and to find ways to tell what is often unspeakable. The quest for ways to narrate horrific facts is a quest for an aesthetics which includes an appeal to the reader and thus necessarily engages with the ethical. This study foregrounds the equivocal as a key feature of narrative ethics.
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a biography of Toni Morrison along with critical views of her work.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Melanie R. Anderson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-03-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s the Bluest Eye written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A child's descent into madness was explored in Eye.
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by L. Wagner-Martin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Art A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved written by Sumedha Bhandari and published by Anchor Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-08 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns. The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison’s works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison’s novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term ‘Humanism’ from which these humanistic concerns arise.
Download or read book Toni Morrison ON Mothers and Motherhood written by Lee Baxter and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the gamut of Toni Morrison’s novels from her earliest to her most recent. Each of the essays examines the various ways in which Morrison’s work delineates and interrogates Western culture’s ideological norms of mothers, motherhood, and mothering. The essays consider Morrison’s female, and in some cases male, characters as challenging the concept that mothering and motherhood is a stable notion. The essays reveal both that mothering is a central concept in Morrison’s work and that an examination of this pervasive notion illuminates her corpus as a whole. Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood offers a wide range of scholarship that provides a compelling look at Morrison’s work through an array of interdisciplinary approaches that are grounded in feminist/gender studies. This interdisciplinary collection of essays will be of interest to scholars and critics concerned with the notions of how we define mother/motherhood/mothering and the problem of its interpretation within Western society, as well as those engaged in the interpretation of African-American literature, and Morrison’s work in particular.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison written by Justine Tally and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Philanthropy in Toni Morrison s Oeuvre written by Rico Hollmach and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Toni Morrison’s highly influential works through the lens of philanthropy. The point of departure of this endeavor is the keen observation that philanthropy has always played a leading role in US discourses about the nation itself. While doing so, time and again philanthropy has also been used as a means of social stratification – especially for so-called social minorities such as the African American community, whose historical experience within the United States is at the very heart of Morrison’s novels. This book pursues the goal of a twofold understanding – on the one hand, through offering a rather innovative access to Morrison’s works, the project allows for new insights into one of today’s most influential authors. On the other hand, this book explores the productivity of the concept of philanthropy for literary and cultural studies – a concept hitherto largely neglected by scholars in both academic fields.
Download or read book Ghosts Metaphor and History in Toni Morrison s Beloved and Gabriel GarcIa MArquez s One Hundred Years of Solitude written by D. Erickson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the complex relations between the figure of the ghost, the textual figure of metaphor and history, in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Download or read book Religiosity Cosmology and Folklore written by Therese E. Higgins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples, relates these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African-American product, and elucidates how this connection helps to understand and to clarify many of Morrison's allusions to the culture out of which she writes. It presents a new way of reading Morrison's work that has been previously overlooked, and moves beyond just African-American culture, delving into Africa and its people.
Download or read book Quiet As It s Kept written by J. Brooks Bouson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the role of shame and trauma as it looks at issues of race, class, color, and caste in the novels of Toni Morrison.
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Pelagia Goulimari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison's visionary explorations of freedom and identity, self and community, against the backdrop of African American history have established her as one of the foremost novelists of her time; an artist whose seriousness of purpose and imaginative power have earned her both widespread critical acclaim and great popular success. This guide to Morrison’s work offers: an accessible introduction to Morrison’s life and historical contexts a guide to her key works and the themes and concerns that run through them an overview of critical texts and perspectives on each of Morrison’s works cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism a chronology of Morrison’s life and works. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Toni Morrison and seeking a guide to her work and a way into the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds it.
