Explore the vast range of titles available.

Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities. Covering the Nobel Prize-winning author's novels (up to Home ), as well as her essays, dramatic works and short stories, this book situates Morrison's writings within both African-American and American writing traditions and examines them in terms of her continuous dialogue with the politics, philosophy and literary forms of these traditions.

This book presents background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples, relates these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African-American product, and elucidates how this connection helps to understand and to.

\"This is the first book-length comparative study of literary giants Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe\"-- Provided by publisher.

Toni Morrison's readers and critics typically focus more on the \"what\" than the \"how\" of her writing.In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing , Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison's expressed narrative intention of providing \"spaces for the reader\" to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

Traces Morrison’s theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison’s novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O’Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women’s experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison’s view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women’s fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O’Reilly, is Morrison’s maternal theory—a politics of the heart. “As an advocate of ‘a politics of the heart,’ O’Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values … Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O’Reilly’s methodical research on Morrison’s works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison’s works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison’s rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition.” — African American Review “O’Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences.” — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering “Andrea O’Reilly examines Morrison’s complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison.” — South Atlantic Review “…it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author … anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O’Reilly’s exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison’s works result in a highly useful scholarly read.” — Literary Mama “By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison’s literary world, O’Reilly conveys Morrison’s vision of motherhood as an act of resistance.” — American Literature “Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison’s interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O’Reilly for illuminating Morrison’s ‘maternal standpoint’ and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature.” — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction “In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O’Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences.” — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O’Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

في هذه السيرة، تستكشف المؤلفة باربرا كرامر حياة توني موريسون الحائزة على جائزة نوبل للآداب، ومسيرتها الحياتية والمهنية. منذ طفولتها في لورين، أوهايو، إلى تعبيراتها الإبداعية عن الثقافة الأميركية-الأفريقية. تقول لطفية الدليمي في مقدمة الكتاب (شدتني علاقة روحية خاصة إلى موريسون، منذ أن قرأت لها روايتها الأولى (العين الأكثر زرقة)، ثم توطدت وشائج هذه العلاقة مع روايتها اللاحقة). فالقيمة الأساسية في روايات موريسون هي السعي الحثيث للأشخاص السود لإيجاد ملامح هويتهم على المستويين الذاتي والثقافي وسط مجتمع تشيع فيه مظاهر اللاعدالة واللامساواة)

This paper offers a comparative analysis of psychological trauma as represented in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), with a particular focus on symptoms consistent with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and war neurosis. Drawing on clinical definitions of PTSD and trauma theory, the essay argues that both novels portray characters whose psychological suffering reflects broader historical traumas—namely, the legacy of American slavery and the catastrophic effects of World War I. In Beloved, the trauma of enslavement manifests through recurring motifs of memory suppression, spectral hauntings, and maternal obsession, while in The Return of the Soldier, West explores the destabilization of class and gender roles in response to wartime psychological rupture. The study foregrounds how race, gender, and social class mediate individual responses to trauma in both narratives, revealing how personal suffering is deeply embedded within collective historical experiences. Ultimately, the essay highlights how Morrison and West use trauma not merely as a character attribute, but as a narrative device that critiques the cultural, psychological, and institutional consequences of violence and systemic oppression.

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved includes a namesake character representing both Christianity and African cosmology. Beloved is neither straightforwardly good nor evil but serves as a dualistic and spiritual symbol. Though one could interpret Morrison’s narrative to support a postmodern religious multiplicity of voices, the potentially problematic theology still allows the readers to engage in useful discussions about the spiritual and cultural inheritance of the American South. Morrison’s narrative is only compatible with a Christian or African religious lens through recognizing symbolization as a representation of cultural manifestations rather than an endorsement of multiple worldviews.