This book examines Toni Morrison’s highly influential works through the lens of philanthropy. The point of departure of this endeavor is the keen observation that philanthropy has always played a leading role in US discourses about the nation itself. While doing so, time and again philanthropy has also been used as a means of social stratification – especially for so-called social minorities such as the African American community, whose historical experience within the United States is at the very heart of Morrison’s novels. This book pursues the goal of a twofold understanding – on the one hand, through offering a rather innovative access to Morrison’s works, the project allows for new insights into one of today’s most influential authors. On the other hand, this book explores the productivity of the concept of philanthropy for literary and cultural studies – a concept hitherto largely neglected by scholars in both academic fields.

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.

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.”

Gothic fiction's focus on the irrational and supernatural would seem to conflict with science fiction's rational foundations. However, as this novel collection demonstrates, the two categories often intersect in rich and revealing ways. Analyzing a range of works—including literature, film, graphic novels, and trading card games—from the past three decades through the lens of this hybrid genre, this volume examines their engagement with the era's dramatic changes in communication technology, medical science, and personal and global politics.

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child explores the integral role of what Kobi Kambon has called the “conscious African family” in developing commercial success stories such as those of Morrison’s protagonist, Bride. Initially, Bride’s accomplishments are an extension of a superficial “cult of celebrity” which inhabits and undermines the development of meaningful interpersonal relationships until a significant literal and metaphorical journey helps her redefine success by facilitating the building of community and family.

In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee described her work as "characterized by visionary force and poetic import [that] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Twenty years later, a group of scholars met in Stockholm to commemorate and celebrate Morrison's award, and just as importantly, to critically engage the wealth of scholarship that has sprung up around Morrison's work-both the six novels recognized by the Nobel committee and those works of fiction and criticism published in the two decades afterwards. The essays in this collection implicitly and explicitly take up Morrison's clarion call to vivify language. They engage her words by elaborating on their meaning, offering readings of her literary texts that highlight their intertextuality, their proliferating conversations with other texts and contexts, and even other languages. In some, Morrison's words give life to authors no longer with us, in others we are encouraged to resituate her writing in unfamiliar contexts in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings generated by her work. The essays offer rich testimony to the life-giving properties of Morrison's language and seek to contribute to the ongoing afterlife of her work by adding to the scholarly conversations animated by her extraordinary literary career. Authors: Andrea Sillis, Lynn Penrod, Sangita Rayamajhi, Anna Iatsenko, Giulia Grillo Mikrut, Lucy Buzacott, Hilary Emmett, Tuire Valkeakari, Aoi Mori, Laura Castor & Kerstin W. Shands.

African American writers have consistently drawn connections between hunger and illiteracy, and by extension between food and reading. This book investigates the juxtaposition of mulnutrition and spectacular food abundance as a key trope of African American writing.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.

Concise discussions of the lives and principal works of American writers, thinkers, and cultural figures, written by subject experts.