Dangerous Freedom

by Page, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780878058617
• ISBN10: 0878058613
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-05-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

The novels of Toni Morrison depict a disjointed culture striving to coalesce in a racialized society. No other contemporary writer conveys this "double consciousness" of African-American life so faithfully. As her characters struggle to negotiate meaningful roles and identities, and as they confront the inescapable issue of division, her novels are permeated with motifs of fragmentation. This divided entity is a theme repeated throughout Morrison's fiction. Operating on many levels, this plurality-in-unity affects narrators, chronologies, individuals, couples, families, neighborhoods, races. Philip Page's critical interpretation of Morrison's first six novels - Sula, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, and Tar Baby - places her fiction in the forefront of American culture, African-American culture and contemporary thought. Her fiction has the power to expand the souls of all readers by taking them into the recesses of other souls-in-process, by requiring them to work the traumas and dilemmas those other souls endure, and by challenging them to know, accept, and keep open their own dangerous freedom.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
The Puzzle of the One-and-the-Many	p. 3
Morrison's Novels as Texts, Not Works	p. 26
The Break Was a Bad One: The Split World of The Bluest Eye	p. 37
Shocked into Separateness: Unresolved Oppositions in Sula	p. 60
Putting It All Together: Attempted Unification in Song of Solomon	p. 84
Everyone Was Out of Place: Contention and Dissolution in Tar Baby	p. 108
Anything Dead Coming Back to Life Hurts: Circularity in Beloved	p. 133
Make Me, Remake Me: Traces, Cracks, and Wells in Jazz	p. 159
What's the World For If You Can't Make It Up the Way You Want It?	p. 178
Notes	p. 189
Works Cited	p. 209
Index	p. 225
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.