Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism

by Middleton,David L.

• ISBN13: 9780815335887
• ISBN10: 0815335881
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• 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 ten 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	xi
Part 1: The Bluest Eye
Storytelling and Moral Agency	3	(24)
Lynne Tirrell
Tracking ``The Look'' in the Novels of Toni Morrison	27	(18)
Ed Guerrero
Part 2: Sula
Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page	45	(16)
Timothy B. Powell
Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula	61	(34)
Diane Gillespie
Missy Dehn Kubitschek
Part 3: Song of Solomon
Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison's Song of Solomon	95	(14)
David Cowart
Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon	109	(26)
Gay Wilentz
``Rememory'': Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison's Novels	135	(30)
Ashraf H.A. Rushdy
Part 4: Tar Baby
Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby	165	(18)
Lauren Lepow
The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby	183	(26)
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Part 5: Beloved
Beloved and the New Apocalypse	209	(22)
Susan Bowers
Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved	231	(16)
David Lawrence
Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison: Reflections on Postmodernism and the Study of Religion and Literature	247	(24)
Ann-Janine Morey
Part 6: Jazz
The Function of Jazz in Toni Morrison's Jazz	271	(12)
Barbara Williams Lewis
Movin' on up: The Madness of Migration in Toni Morrison's Jazz	283	(14)
Deborah H. Barnes
The Problem of Narrative in Toni Morrison's Jazz	297	(14)
Katherine J. Mayberry
Contributors	311	(6)
Credits	317	(4)
Index	321