• BIBLIOGRAPHIES
• CRITICAL STUDIES
• AUDIO AND VIDEO RECORDINGS
• INTERVIEWS
• GENERAL REFERENCES
• WEBSITE

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Mekkawi, Mod. Toni Morrison: A Bibliography. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Libraries, 1986. A comprehensive list of Morrison’s novels through Tar Baby. Includes reviews, articles, and essays about the novels and interviews. Also lists audio books and audio and video interviews.

Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Excellent reference for Morrison’s novels, her early articles and essays, and selected critical studies.

Word-Work: Newsletter of the Toni Morrison Society. The annual bibliography issue is the most comprehensive list other than the annual MLA International Bibliography.

CRITICAL STUDIES

BOOKS

Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York, 2000. Morrison’s novels are read through recent psychoanalytic theories of shame and trauma.

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. A general overview of Morrison’s novels through Jazz. It includes a chapter on Morrison’s criticism in Playing in the Dark, and an annotated bibliography.

Gutmann, Katharina. Celebrating the Senses: An Analysis of the Sensual in Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Bern, Switzerland: Francke, 2000. One of the few studies that focuses on the synaesthetic quality of Morrison’s fiction.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Examines Morrison’s use of folklore and oral traditions in her first five novels.

Holloway, Karla F. C, and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. This work is as much of a personal engagement between two scholars, one African American, one white, as it is an overview of Morrison’s novels.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness. London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991. This study traces the impact of African writers and Pan-Africanism on Morrison’s first five novels and on her personal political positions.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Literary Frontiers, no. 33. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. A short, thematic study of Morrison’s early fiction.

Patell, Cyrus R. K. Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Philosophy students and scholars will find this study particularly engaging. Patell examines the work of Morrison and Thomas Pynchon through the work of John Rawls, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other liberal thinkers.

Plasa, Carl, ed. Toni Morrison: Beloved. Columbia Critical Guides. Cambridge: Icon, 1998. A helpful guide to reviews and the most significant critical essays on Beloved. Includes excerpts from interviews with Morrison about the novel.

Rigley, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. A thoughtful analysis of Morrison’s uses of language in her first five novels.

Samuels, Wilfred D. and Clenora HudsonWeems. Toni Morrison. Twayne’s United States Authors. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A basic introduction to Morrison and her first five novels.

Williams, Lisa. The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Morrison’s essays in Playing in the Dark are brought to bear on this study.

ESSAY COLLECTIONS

Andrews, William L. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Beloved: A Casebook. Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Most of the essays were previously published. They are especially helpful for understanding some of the complex political issues of the era in which the novel takes place.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. A basic study guide. It includes a list of characters, brief thematic and structural analyses, excerpts from reviews, and critical essays about the novel.

Bloom, ed. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. Includes the best of previously published articles and essays on the novel.

Bloom, ed. Toni Morrison’s Sula. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. A collection of the best of previously published articles and essays on the novel.

Connor, Marc C., ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. This collection shows how studies on Morrison have evolved over the years from political and ideological interpretations to an emphasis on her writing as art.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Includes previously published reviews and new articles on Morrison’s novels through Jazz.

Kolmerten, Carol A., Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg, eds. Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Refreshingly clear and thoughtful essays on intertextual relations between Morrison and William Faulkner.

McKay, and Kathryn Earle, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison. Approaches to Teaching World Literature, no. 59. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997. Offers several different and useful pedagogical approaches.

McKay, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Critical Essays in American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1988. A collection of previously published reviews and original essays on Morrison’s novels through Tar Baby.

Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland, 1997. These essays offer several new approaches to studying Morrison’s fiction, including postmodernism and cultural critique.

Paquet, Anne-Marie. Toni Morrison, Figures de Femmes. Paris: Presses de I’Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 1996. An excellent introduction to Morrison’s novels for French speakers.

Peterson, Nancy J., ed. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. An eclectic and rather uneven collection of essays, it focuses mainly on Morrison’s postmodernism.

Smith, Valerie, ed. New Essays on Song of Solomon. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A basic introduction to the novel for college undergraduates.

Solomon, Barbara H., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York: Hall, 1998. Includes previously published reviews and articles on Beloved.

JOURNALS AND NEWSLETTERS

African American Review, 26 (Spring 1992): 7-76. The first six essays are devoted to works by Morrison.

African American Review, 35 (Summer 2001): 181-248. The first four essays are devoted to works by Morrison.

Callaioo, 13 (1990): 471-525. Special section on Morrison.

Modern Fiction Studies, 39 (1993): 461-859. Special issue on Morrison, edited by Nancy J. Peterson.

Word-Work: Newsletter of the Toni Morrison Society. Toni Morrison Society. Atlanta: Georgia State University.

BOOK CHAPTERS AND ARTICLES

Bell, Bernard. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-slave Narrative; or, Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past.” African American Review, 26 (1992): 7-15.

Bent, Geoffrey. “Less than Divine: Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” Southern Review,35 (Winter 1999): 145-149.

Bischoff, Joan. “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted Sensitivity.” Studies in Black Literature, 6 (Fall 1975): 21-23.

Boesenberg, Eva. Gender-Voice-Vemacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1999. An excellent example of recent European scholarship written in English on African American women writers. Boesenberg examines Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Morrison’s Sula, and Walker’s The Color Purple.

Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Offers a “deconstructive” reading of the “politics of narration” that form the ideological framework of their novels. Chapter 3 deals with The Bluest Eye and Sula (pp. 59-89). Chapter 6 includes a discussion of Tar Baby (pp. 153-162).

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition: 1892-1976, Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1980. Chapter 5 is a thematic reading of The Bluest Eye and Sula (pp. 137-139).

Cowart, David. “Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” American Literature, 62 (1990): 87-100.

Davis, Cynthia A. “Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Contemporary Literature, 23 (1973): 323-340.

De Weever, Jacqueline. “The Inverted World of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula.” College Language Association Journal, 22 (June 1979): 402-414.

Eichelberger, Julia. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. The readings in this study are guided by what the author calls an “ideology of domination,” a term she carefully explicates in the introduction. Chapter 2 is about The Bluest Eye (pp. 58-94).

Horvitz, Deborah. “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction, 17 (Autumn 1989): 157-167.

House, Elizabeth B. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction, 18 (Spring 1990): 17-26.

Hovet, Grace Ann, and Barbara Lounsberry. “Flying as Symbol in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon.” CLA Journal, 27 (December 1983): 119-140.

Hubbard, Dolan. “In Quest of Authority:Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and the Rhetoric of the Black Preacher.” College Language Association Journal, 35 (March 1992): 288-302.

Khayati, Abdellatif. “Representation, Race, and the ’Language’ of the Inef-fable in Toni Morrison’s Narrative.” African American Review, 33 (1999): 313-324.

Klotman, Phyllis R. “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum, 13 (Winter 1979): 123-125.

Koolish, Lynda. “Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text.” African American Review, 29 (Fall 1995):421-438.

Lane, Bonnie Shipman. “Toni Morrison’s Rainbow Code.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 24 (Spring 1983): 173-181.

McLeod, A. L. Commonwealth and American Nobel Laureates in Literature: Essays in Criticism. New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1998. A collection of essays on works by six Nobel Laureates, including Morrison and Wole Soyinka.

Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative. Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Focuses on the use of folklore and myth in Jewett’s fiction and in Song of Solomon and Tar Baby (pp.91-167).

Moglen, Helene. “Redeeming History:Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp.201-220.

Moses, Cat. “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” African American Review, 33 (Winter 1999):623-636.

Pessoni, Michele. “’She was laughing at their God’: Discovering the Goddess Within in Sula.” African American Review, 29 (Fall 1995): 439-451.

Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, pp. 50-97. Chapter 3 is an excellent examination of how Morrison weaves history into her narratives in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.

Reyes, Angelita. “Ancient Properties in the New World: The Paradox of the ’Other’ in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.” Black Scholar 17. 2 (1986): 19-25.

Rosenberg, Ruth. “Seeds in Hard Ground:Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum, 21 (Winter 1987): 435-445.

Sale, Maggie. “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved.” African American Review, 26 (Spring 1992): 41-50.

Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved.” African American Review, 26 (Spring 1992): 17-30.

Skerret, Joseph T. “Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 192-202.

Vickroy, Laurie. “The Politics of Abuse:The Traumatized Child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras.” Mosaic, 29 (June 1996): 91-109.

Wilentz, Gay. “Civilizations Underneath:African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” African American Review, 26 (1992): 61-76.

Wilentz. “If You Surrender to the Air:Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature.” MELUS, 16. 1 (1990): 21-32.

Wright, Lee Alfred. Identity, Family, and Folklore in African American Literature. New York: Garland, 1995; pp.75-131. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with The Bluest Eye and Sula, respectively.

AUDIO AND VIDEO RECORDINGS

A Conversation with Toni Morrison. Part 3 of In Black and White. Directed and produced by Matteo Bellinelli. Written by Barbara Christian. San Francisco, Cal.: California Newsree/ RTSI Swiss Television, 1992.

Indentifiable Qualities: A Film on Toni Morrison. Directed and produced by Sindamani Bridglal. New York: Women Make Movies, 1989.

Ordeal of the Woman Writer Audio cassette. New York: Norton, 1974.

Profile of a Writer: Toni Morrison. Directed and produced by Alan Benson. Chicago, 111.: Home Vision, 1987.

Toni Morrison. Produced by Harry A. Radliffe II. New York: CBS, 1998.

Toni Morrison Uncensored. Directed by Gary Deans. Produced by Alan Hall &Jana Wendt. Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1998.

A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers: A Writers World with Toni Morrison. Parts 1 & 2. Directed and produced by Gail Pellett. Alexandria, Va.: PBS Video, 1990.

INTERVIEWS

Denard, Carolyn, “Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Word-Work: Newsletter of the Toni Morrison Society, 6 (Fall 1999): 4-5, 14-21.

Jaffrey, Zia. “Toni Morrison: The Salon Interview” Salon.com (2 February 1998).

Schappell, Elissa, and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV.” Paris Review, 128 (Fall 1993): 83-125.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson:University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

GENERAL REFERENCES

Adell, Sandra, ed. Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture: African American Culture. Detroit: Gale, 1996.

Baker Jr., Houston A. Workings of the Spirit:The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Baker and Patricia Redmond, eds.Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Bell, Roseann, Bettye Parker, and Beverly Guy Shiftall, eds. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Slaves Narrative. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Donalson, Melvin, ed. Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Includes Morrison’s short story,“Recitatif.”

Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984.

Gates. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York: Meridian, 1990.

Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Volumes 1 & 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. New York: Feminist Press, 1982.

Kerner, Charlotte, ed. Madame Curie und Curie Schwestent: Frauen, die den Noblepreis bekamen. Weinheim, Germany & Basel, Switzerland: Beltz, 1997. Short biographies, in German, of women Nobel Prize winners from Marie Curie (1903) to Wislawa Szymborska (1996).

Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

Washington, Mary Helen. Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1980.

Werner, Craig. Black American Women Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography. Pasadena, Cal.: Salem, 1989.

WEBSITE

Anniina’s Toni Morrison Page.

This website is the most comprehensive and well maintained for Morrison. It includes links to reviews and essays about Morrison’s novels in scholarly journals such as African American Review, Twentieth Century Literature, and MELUS. It also includes links to recent on-line interviews with Morrison, links to audio excerpts of Morrison reading from The Bluest Eye, and links to other Morrison web pages, including the Random House website, where readers can find a study guide for Paradise. Highly recommended.