The Bluest Eye (Plume Essential Edition)

by Morrison, Toni

• ISBN13: 9780452287068
• ISBN10: 0452287065
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-06
• Publisher: Plume

Summary

The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who 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.

Table of Contents

Editor's Note	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Intense Behaviors: the Use of the Grotesque in the Bluest Eye and Eva's Man	p. 3
Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in the Bluest Eye	p. 13
Bleak Beginnings: the Bluest Eye	p. 27
The Language and Music of Survival	p. 33
Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison	p. 45
""""The Evil of Fulfillment"""": Scapegoating and Narration in the Bluest Eye	p. 65
Text and Countertext in the Bluest Eye	p. 105
""""Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"""": the Politics of Form in the Bluest Eye	p. 121
Transgression as Poesis in the Bluest Eye	p. 139
The Bluest Eye: the Need for Racial Approbation	p. 153
Afterword	p. 163
The Bluest Eye (1970)	p. 169
Black Girlhood and Black Womanhood: the Bluest Eye and Sula	p. 183
The Politics of Abuse: the Traumatized Child in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye and Marguerite Duras	p. 203
M'Dear's Deductive Methodology	p. 221
When Home Fails to Nurture the Self: the Tragedy of Being Homeless at Home	p. 225
Naming the Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison's Covert Letter to Ralph Ellison	p. 239
Chronology	p. 251
Contributors	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 255
Acknowledgments	p. 257
Index	p. 261
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