The voices of Toni Morrison / Barbara Hill Rigney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rigney, Barbara Hill, 1938-

Contributor:

Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019--Criticism and interpretation.

Morrison, Toni.

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019.

Feminism and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Feminism and literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

History.

African American women in literature.

Penn Provenance:

Banks, Joanna (donor) (Banks Collection copy)

Physical Description:

12 unnumbered pages, 127 pages, 5 unnumbered pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1991.

Summary:

In her analysis of Morrison's five novels - Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Tar Baby - Rigney defines a black feminine/feminist aesthetic. The many "voices" of Toni Morrison, Rigney argues, are manifested in her radical use of language, her reformulations of self and identity, her reinterpretations of history as both fact and mythology, and her images of female desire. As Rigney describes Morrison's texts, they are characterized by deliberate and meaningful silences, by the movement beyond language into music, and by representations of magic realism and the conjure world. While Morrison's fictions disrupt traditional chronologies and diffuse linearity, they also bear historical witness to the realities and brutalities of slavery, reconstruction, depression, and war - and thus, Rigney documents, they are always profoundly political. Rigney's study, like Morrison's novels, transcends traditional interpretations, maps new territory for postmodern fictions, and cultivates a common ground for a discourse on theory, race, and gender.

Contents:

Breaking the Back of Words: Language and Signification

Hagar's Mirror: Self and Identity

"The Disremembered and Unaccounted For": History, Myth, and Magic

Rainbows and Brown Sugar: Desire and the Erotic

Afterword.

Notes:

"Jacket design: Mike Jaynes."

"Jacket illustration: Aminah Robinson, 'Woman Resting,' Sapelo Island Series, 1985 ..."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-123) and index.

Local Notes:

Kislak Center Banks Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries in 2018 by Joanna Banks.

Banks Collection copy: dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0814205542

OCLC:

23769651