Toni Morrison : memory and meaning / edited by Adrienne Lanier Seward and Justine Tally ; foreword, Carolyn C. Denard ; contributors, Katherine Clay Bassard [and twenty four others].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Denard, Carolyn C., author of introduction, etc.

Contributor:

Seward, Adrienne Lanier, 1945- editor.

Tally, Justine, editor.

Bassard, Katherine Clay, 1959- contributor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Morrison, Toni.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Jackson, [Mississippi] : University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature presented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchez's "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

The Buckeye

Part I. "This is where I belong"

"Dangerously Free": Morrison's Unspeakable Territory

Modernity and the Homeless: Toni Morrison and the Fictions of Modernism

Resurrecting the Dead Girl: Modernism and the Problem of History in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise

To Make a Humanist Black: Toni Wofford's Howard Years

Part II. "Regrets, excuses, righteousness, false memory and future plans mixed together or stood like soldiers in line"

Trying to Get Home: Place and Memory in Toni Morrison's Fiction

The Pursuit of Memory

Personal and Cultural Memory in A Mercy

Love: An Elegy for the African American Community, or The Unintended Consequences of Desegregation/Integration

Part III. "Her garden was not Eden

it was so much more than that"

From Eden to Paradise: A Pilgrimage through Toni Morrison's Trilogy

"And the Greatest of These": Toni Morrison, the Bible, Love

Palimpsest: Reading John Winthrop through the Morrison Trilogy

Magically Flying with Toni Morrison: Mexico, Gabriel García Márquez, Song of Solomon, and Sula

Part IV. "Now it seemed both fresh and ancient, safe and demanding"

Property and American Identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Aeschylus, Euripides, and Toni Morrison: Miasma, Revenge, and Atonement

Toni Morrison's Performance of the Word in Song of Solomon: The Folkloric, the Fantastic, and "Some Old Folk's Lie"

"A Kind of Restoration": Psychogeographies of Healing in Toni Morrison's Home

Part V. "You can keep on writing but I think you ought to know what's true"

Aesthetic Activity

"'There is the Power,' he thought, 'right there'": Dramatizing Entropy in Tar Baby and Paradise

Telling Stories: Evolving Narrative Identity in Toni Morrison's Home.

Newness trembles me"? Representations of White Masculinity in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

The Sound of Change: A Musical Transit through the Wounded Modernity of Desdemona

Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781628460209

1628460202

9781626740419

1626740410

OCLC:

871186766