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Toni Morrison

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  • Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, "Gendering the Genderless: The Case of Toni Morrison's Beloved," Obsidian II 8, no. 1 (spring-summer 1993): 1-17. (Examines the blurring of conventional notions of gender in Beloved.)
  • Bell, Bernard W., "Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past," African American Review 26, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 7-15. (Discusses Beloved as an exploration of the "double consciousness" of Black Americans.)
  • Bell, Bernard W., "Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past," in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's “Beloved,” edited by Barbara H. Solomon, pp. 166-76. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998. (Examination of Beloved as a black feminist text that gives voice to those silenced by slavery.)
  • Bender, Eileen T., "Repossessing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, edited by Bonnie Braendlin, pp. 129-42. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1991. (Argues that Beloved is Morrison's meditated reaction against the sentimental stereotypes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel. According to Bender, Morrison's novel represents a "new act of emancipation for a culture still enslaved by false impressions and factitious accounts.")
  • Bidney, Martin, "Creating a Feminist-Communitarian Romanticism in Beloved: Toni Morrison's New Uses for Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth," Papers on Language & Literature 36, no. 3 (summer 2000): 271-301. (Contends that critics generally ignore Morrison's regeneration of the work of the major British romantic poets in Beloved.)
  • Bjork, Patrick Bryce, "Beloved: The Paradox of a Past and Present Self and Place," in his The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the Community, pp. 141-62. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992. (Examines the contradictions of personal identity and memory in Morrison's novel.)
  • Chandler, Marilyn R., "Housekeeping and Beloved: When Women Come Home," in her Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, pp. 291-318. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. (Analyzes Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping "under the rubric of house and home as ideas in relation to which women in every generation and in every situation have had to 'work out their salvation' and define their identities.")
  • Cormier-Hamilton, Patrice, "Black Naturalism and Toni Morrison: The Journey Away from Self-Love in The Bluest Eye," MELUS 19, no. 4 (winter 1994): 109-27. (Provides discussion of the idea of self-love, and Pecola's struggles against loving herself and her race.)
  • Darling, Marsha Jean, "Ties That Bind," The Women's Review of Books V, no. 6 (March 1988): 4-5. (Praises Beloved as a masterpiece of historical fiction which "challenges, seduces, cajoles and enjoins us to visualize, contemplate, to know, feel and comprehend the realities of the material world of nineteenth-century Black women and men.")
  • Davis, Christina, "Beloved: A Question of Identity," Présence Africaine 145 (1988): 151-56. (Extols Morrison's gift for giving expression to the subjective consciousness of Sethe, a slave whose voice "is clear, its pain full of anguish, its beauty unbearable, its truth stunning.")
  • Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A., "Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved," African American Review 26, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 51-9. (Argues that Beloved "develops the idea that maternal bonds can stunt or even obviate a woman's individuation or sense of self," and that "the conclusion of the book effects a resolution of the tension between history and nature which underlies the movement of the work as a whole.")
  • Dickerson, Vanessa D., "Summoning SomeBody: The Flesh Made Word in Toni Morrison's Fiction," in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, pp. 195-216. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. (Analysis of how Morrison's characters recover and repossess the black female body.)
  • Duvall, John N., "Authentic Ghost Stories: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved," The Faulkner Journal IV, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 1988–Spring 1989): 83-97. (Compares the ghost story elements in novels by Morrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Faulkner.)
  • Duvall, John N., "Descent in the ‘House of Chloe’: Race, Rape, and Identity in Tar Baby," in The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, pp. 99-117. New York: Palgrave, 2000. (Discusses the importance of Morrison's fourth novel, the critically neglected Tar Baby, and its intertextual references to the Book of Genesis.)
  • Eckard, Paula Gallant, "Toni Morrison," in Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, pp. 33-37. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. (Explores how Morrison combines myth and reality in her treatment of maternal experience in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved.)
  • Galehouse, Maggie, "‘New World Woman’: Toni Morrison's Sula," Papers on Language & Literature 35, no. 4 (fall 1999): 339-62. (Explores the independent nature of Sula's title character and raises questions about her accessibility to the reader.)
  • Gillespie, Diane and Missy Dehn Kubitschek, "Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula," in Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, edited by David L. Middleton, pp. 61-91. New York: Garland, 1997. (Praises Morrison's representation of female psychological development in Sula.)
  • Goldman, Anne E., "'I Made the Ink': (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved," Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 313-30. (Argues that Beloved and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose "comment implicitly on the gap between mainstream critical theories and modern literary practice" by their construction of strong heroines who integrate themselves through writing, in contrast to the narrative fragmentation of postmodern fiction.)
  • Harris, Trudier, "Of Mother Love and Demons," Callaloo 11, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 387-89. (Analyzes Morrison's treatment of the "mother love" theme in Beloved. Harris argues that in "exorcising" Beloved "the women favor the living over the dead, mother love over childish punishment of parents, reality over the legend of which they have become a part.")
  • Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere, eds., Understanding Toni Morrison's “Beloved” and “Sula”: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co., 2000, 381 p. (Thorough examination of Morrison's works, including a lengthy bibliographic resource.)
  • Langer, Adam, "Star Power," Book (November/December 2003): 40-6. (Provides an overview of Morrison's life and career and discusses her novel Love.)
  • Malmgren, Carl D., "Mixed Genres and the Logic of Slavery in Toni Morrison's Beloved," Critique XXXVI, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 96-106. (Notes Beloved's incorporation of elements from various genres, including the ghost story and historical novel, and argues that "[it] is the institution of slavery that supplies the logic underwriting the novel, the thematic glue that unifies this multifaceted text.")
  • McDowell, Deborah E., "‘The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text," in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 77-90. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. (Maintains that in Sula, Morrison creates a different kind of identity for the black female in America.)
  • McKay, Nellie, "An Interview with Toni Morrison," Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (winter 1983): 413-29. (McKay talks with Morrison about black women's writing and her first four novels.)
  • Middleton, David L., Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987, 186 p. (Includes considerable criticism on Morrison's first four novels, as well as other writings, interviews, and anthologies.)
  • Mitchell, Angelyn, "‘Sth, I Know That Woman’: History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison's Jazz," Studies in the Literary Imagination 31, no. 2 (fall 1998): 49-60. (Asserts that in Jazz, Morrison fuses her primary concerns: the lives of black women and the historical circumstances of life in the South.)
  • Mix, Debbie, "Toni Morrison: A Selected Bibliography," Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1993): 795-818. (Bibliography covering selected criticism on Morrison's novels.)
  • Peach, Linden, "The 1990s: Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998)," in Toni Morrison, pp. 126-71. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. (Provides discussion of the themes, motifs, and structure, as well as the cultural and historical context, of Jazz and Paradise.)
  • Peterson, Nancy J., "Toni Morrison Double Issue," Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1993): 461-794. (A special double issue containing essays by a variety of critics on Morrison's novels and her place in the literary canon.)
  • Rigney, Barbara Hill, "'A Story to Pass On': Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, pp. 229-35. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. (Explains the meaning of history in Beloved as "the reality of slavery. The 'rememories' are a gross catalogue of atrocities, gross sexual indignities, a denial of human rights on every level.")
  • Rigney, Barbara Hill, The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991, 127 p. (Examination of Morrison's position within the discourses of both race and gender.)
  • Storhoff, Gary, "‘Anaconda Love’: Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Style 31, no. 2 (summer 1997): 290-309. (An examination of the dysfunctional families—both matriarchal and patriarchal—that populate Song of Solomon.)
  • Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, 293 p. (Collection of interviews and conversations between Morrison and various authors and critics including Alice Childress, Robert Stepto, Gloria Naylor, and Bill Moyers.)
  • Trace, Jacqueline, "Dark Goddesses: Black Feminist Theology in Morrison's Beloved," Obsidian II 6, no. 3 (winter 1991): 14-30. (Discussion of specific qualities of black feminism and theology in Beloved treating Morrison's use of goddess mythology and its contribution to a new theology for African-American women.)
  • Wagner, Linda W., "Toni Morrison: Mastery of Narrative," in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, pp. 191-204. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. (Critical assessment of the narrative techniques employed by Morrison in her first four novels.)
  • Willis, Susan, "Eruptions of Funk: Historicising Toni Morrison," in Reading the Past: Literature and History, edited by Tamsin Spargo, pp. 44-55. New York: Palgrave, 2000. (Originally published in 1987, Willis's essay argues that Morrison's novels explore the question of how to maintain an African-American cultural identity in contemporary society.)

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Morrison, Toni (Literary Masters)
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