Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism

by Middleton,David L.

• ISBN13: 9780815308690
• ISBN10: 0815308698
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-11-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading from Without and Within: Critical Argument and the Study of Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
Storytelling and Moral Agency	p. 3
Tracking "The Look" in the Novels of Toni Morrison	p. 27
Sula
Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page	p. 45
Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula	p. 61
Song of Solomon
Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison's Song of Solomon	p. 95
Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon	p. 109
"Rememory": Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison's Novels	p. 135
Tar Baby
Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby	p. 165
The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby	p. 183
Beloved
Beloved and the New Apocalypse	p. 209
Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved	p. 231
Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison: Reflections on Postmodernism and the Study of Religion and Literature	p. 247
Jazz
The Function of Jazz in Toni Morrison's Jazz	p. 271
Movin' on up: The Madness of Migration in Toni Morrison's Jazz	p. 283
The Problem of Narrative in Toni Morrison's Jazz	p. 297
Contributors	p. 311
Credits	p. 317
Index	p. 321
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