Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning

Adrienne Lanier Seward · Justine Tally

Ogo 2014 · Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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 represented 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.”

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Adrienne Lanier Seward is professor in the English Department at Colorado College. She serves on the executive board of the Toni Morrison Society. Justine Tally is professor of American literature at the University of La Laguna. She is author of Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison’s (Hi)stories and Truths; The Story of Jazz: Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination; and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: Origins. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison.