Toni Morrison, Second Edtion: Historical Perspectives and Literary Contexts (Modern Novelists)

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. In this new edition, there is more emphasis upon critical debates that Morrison's fiction has generated and the different theoretical approaches that may be taken to her work.