Spectrality In The Novels Of Toni Morrison

Author : Melanie R. Anderson
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1572339802
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Melanie R. Anderson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-03-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.

Author : Anya Heise-von der Lippe
Publisher : University of Wales Press
ISBN 13 : 1786837609
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monstrous Textualities written by Anya Heise-von der Lippe and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It brings together a range of critical approaches (the Gothic, monster theory, critical posthumanism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, feminist theory, fat studies, cyborg theory) including very recent forays into posthumanist / new materialist intersections It contributes new readings to the critical canon on a wide range of critically acclaimed texts (from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein via Toni Morrison’s and Angela Carter’s work to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) It explores narrative strategies of resistance against systemic cultural oppression and challenges a number of critical approaches in the process

Author : Alice Sundman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000543331
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place written by Alice Sundman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison’s archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author’s textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places. In a methodology combining close reading and genetic criticism, the book examines Morrison’s writing—her drafting and crafting—of her fictional places. Focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and A Mercy (2008), it analyses particular instances of written places, illuminating the manifold ways in which they are formed as text, and showing the centrality of the ideas of joining in Beloved, transformation in Paradise, and articulation in A Mercy. Toni Morrison is a major literary figure in contemporary literature, and is commonly considered one of the most influential American writers of the post-1960s era. Investigating the conjunction of her texts and manuscripts, this book continues, extends, and supplements the rich body of Morrison scholarship by illuminating how the genesis and formation of her multifaceted literary places constitute vital parts of her fictional writing.

Author : L. Wagner-Martin
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137446706
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison written by L. Wagner-Martin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Ann Genzale
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 179360553X
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction written by Ann Genzale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction highlights the ways religious belief and practice intersect with questions of national belonging in the work of major contemporary writers. Through readings of novels by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Cristina García, and others, this book argues that the representations of syncretic, culturally hybrid, and improvised forms of religious practice operate in these novels as critiques of exclusionary constructions of national identity, providing models for alternate ways of belonging based on shared religious beliefs and practices. Rather than treating the religious history of the U.S. as one of increasing secularization, this book instead calls for greater attention to the diversity of religious experience in the U.S., as well as a deeper understanding of the ways in which these experiences can inform relationships to the national community.

Author : Kelly Reames
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350239941
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison written by Kelly Reames and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most substantial collection of critical essays on Morrison to appear since her death in mid-2019, this book contains previously unpublished essays which both acknowledge the universal significance of her writing even as they map new directions. Essayists include pre-eminent Morrison scholars, as well as scholars who work in cultural criticism, African American letters, American modernism, and women's writing. The book includes work on Morrison as a public intellectual; work which places Morrison's writing within today's currents of contemporary fiction; work which draws together Morrison's “trilogy” of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise alongside Dos Passos' USA trilogy; work which links Morrison to such Black Atlantic artists as Lubaina Himid and others as well as work which offers a reading of “influence” that goes both directions between Morrison and Faulkner. Another cluster of essays treats seldom-discussed works by Morrison, including an essay on Morrison as writer of children's books and as speaker for children's education. In addition, a “Teaching Morrison” section is designed to help teachers and critics who teach Morrison in undergraduate classes. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison is wide-ranging, provocative, and satisfying; a fitting tribute to one of the greatest American novelists.

Author : Emmanuel S. Nelson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1610698819
Total Pages : 595 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ethnic American Literature written by Emmanuel S. Nelson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike any other book of its kind, this volume celebrates published works from a broad range of American ethnic groups not often featured in the typical canon of literature. This culturally rich encyclopedia contains 160 alphabetically arranged entries on African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American literary traditions, among others. The book introduces the uniquely American mosaic of multicultural literature by chronicling the achievements of American writers of non-European descent and highlighting the ethnic diversity of works from the colonial era to the present. The work features engaging topics like the civil rights movement, bilingualism, assimilation, and border narratives. Entries provide historical overviews of literary periods along with profiles of major authors and great works, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maya Angelou, Sherman Alexie, A Raisin in the Sun, American Born Chinese, and The House on Mango Street. The book also provides concise overviews of genres not often featured in textbooks, like the Chinese American novel, African American young adult literature, Mexican American autobiography, and Cuban American poetry.

Author : Linda Wagner-Martin
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030885909
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Linda Wagner-Martin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison’s intellectual growth as an artist. Linda Wagner-Martin 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 plus years. The revised edition includes new discussion of God Help the Child, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard. These additions present and intensify scholarship on Morrison’s major literary contributions, but also trace her significant role as a public intellectual, bringing to light the consistency of Morrison’s aesthetic and political visions.

Author : Anissa Janine Wardi
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496834186
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison and the Natural World written by Anissa Janine Wardi and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

Author : Lisa Kröger
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611494524
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film written by Lisa Kröger and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays expanding the concepts of "ghost" and "haunting" beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, including fiction and film, this collection explores the phenomenon of social ghosts. What does it mean, for example, to be invisible, to be a ghost, particularly when that ghost is representative of a person or group living on the margins of society? Why do specific types of ghosts tend to haunt certain cultures and/or places? What is it about a people's history that invites these types of hauntings? The essays in this book, like pieces of a puzzle, approach the larger questions from diverse individual perspectives, but, taken together, they offer a richly detailed composite discussion of what it means to be haunted.