Toni Morrison: Literary Icon: Literary Criticism

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays.

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination.

Contested Boundaries aims to map the space between A Mercy, Toni Morrison's ninth and arguably most enigmatic novel, and the fiction comprising the author's multiple-text canon. The volume accomplishes this through the inclusion of eight original essays representing a range of critical approaches that trouble narrative boundaries demarcating the novels included in Morrison's evolving opus, with A Mercy serving as a locus for discussion of her re-figuration of concerns central to her narrative project. Issues relevant to the conflicted mother-child relationship, the haunting legacy of slavery, the black female body as a site of trauma, the thorny quest for an idealized home, the perilous transatlantic journey, the demands associated with love, and, yes, the desire for mercy recur, but they do so with a difference, a Morrisonian twist that demands close intellectual scrutiny.

Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison's other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics and unpublished pieces for performance. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon's insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work.

Toni Morrison features a collection of ten new essays by noted Morrison scholars, including recipients of the Toni Morrison Society Book Award. Focusing upon Morrison's most recently published novels (Paradise, Love, A Mercy) the contributors to this volume revisit issues that continue to engage Morrison and are part of the currency of contemporary American literary and cultural history. These selections examine Morrison's ongoing "romance" with African Americans as they continue to battle the demons of race, gender, class, and poverty, to name a few. Together, these essays offer comprehensive and nuanced discussions of Morrison's latest novels and provide new directions for Morrison scholarship in the 21st century. This volume provides students of literature, cultural studies, and history with an overview of Morrison's examination of African American progress and leadership at key moments in American history and culture from the Colonial Period to the present. Through their thematic interconnectedness, the essays reveal Morrison at her most brilliant in her ability to reach into the past to comment on contemporary issues.

In this startling group memoir, four friends--black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born--use Toni Morrison's novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Toni Morrison, Novelist is a collection of essays on Morrison's eleven novels from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child. The author of the collection analyses the novels strictly from a literary- critical point of view and deliberately avoids approaching them from any theoretical perspective, as he believes that Morrison's fiction-for that matter, literary work of any writer of merit, -- is too rich and complex to yield to theoretical analysis and that much would be lost by any such study. This position may sound heretical today, but invites accommodation in the present context when Morrison herself has declared that she contributes no ideology or theory. She is committed to the presentation of Black experience, but she does so in a way to make it look like common human experience of the oppressed classes of people of any race, nationality, or color.

Toni Morrison is universally recognized for reclaiming the occluded narratives of African-American history and the Africanist presence in American national identity. This revised version of Toni Morrison (Macmillan Modern Novelists, 1995) highlights the extent to which her work invokes, often subversively, familiar African-American and Euro-American verbal narratives and is engaged by the histories that are obscured, distorted or occluded in them. Reviewing Morrison's career over nearly thirty years, from The Bluest Eye to Paradise, this recently revised study suggests that as her work has become more specifically concerned with particular episodes or events in Black history, it has also become more involved in the complexities of historiography.

Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison draws on contemporary scholarship and Morrison's own commentary to explicate all of her novels published to date, including her 2008 novel A Mercy. Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner, is an unabashedly confrontational author. Her profound and complex novels address problems such as slavery, violence, poverty, and sexual abuse. Morrison's work encompasses a project of total cultural renewal: she re-imagines and reaffirms the experience of African Americans from the earliest days of slavery up to the present, avoiding stereotypes or oversimplification.

This volume offers students and book club members a handy and insight-filled guide to Morrison's works and their relation to current events and popular culture. * Provides questions that can be used to generate book club discussion * Includes sidebars to highlight interesting information about the author and her work * Offers a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources to facilitate further study * Film adaptations of the author's works, such as Beloved, are discussed and their impact explored

Toni Morrison's visionary explorations of freedom and identity, self and community, against the backdrop of African American history have established her as one of the foremost novelists of her time; an artist whose seriousness of purpose and imaginative power have earned her both widespread critical acclaim and great popular success. This guide to Morrison’s work offers: an accessible introduction to Morrison’s life and historical contexts a guide to her key works and the themes and concerns that run through them an overview of critical texts and perspectives on each of Morrison’s works cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism a chronology of Morrison’s life and works.

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison -- fiction, non-fiction, and other -- drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.