Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition

The Invention of an Aesthetic

Justine Baillie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781474222914
• eBook ISBN: 9781441184467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities. Covering the Nobel Prize-winning author's novels (up to Home ), as well as her essays, dramatic works and short stories, this book situates Morrison's writings within both African-American and American writing traditions and examines them in terms of her continuous dialogue with the politics, philosophy and literary forms of these traditions. Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition provides a comprehensive analysis of Morrison's entire oeuvre, from her early interrogation of Black Power to her engagement with fin de siècle postcolonial critiques of nationalism and twenty-first century considerations of ecology. Justine Baillie goes on to argue that Morrison's aesthetic should be understood in relation to the historical, political and cultural contexts in which it, and the African-American and American literary traditions upon which she draws, have been created and developed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘The Changing Same’
• 1 Historical and Literary Context: The Harlem Renaissance
• 2 Ideology, Identity and the Community: The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973)
• 3 Intertextuality and Gender Politics: Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981)
• 4 Repetition, Memory and the End of Race: Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998)
• 5 Reading and Writing: Love (2003), A Mercy (2008) and Home (2012)
• Bibliography
• Index