Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014Toni 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. Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition provides a comprehensive analysis of Morrison's entire oeuvre, from her early interrogation of Black Power to her engagement with fin de siècle postcolonial critiques of nationalism and twenty-first century considerations of ecology. Justine Baillie goes on to argue that Morrison's aesthetic should be understood in relation to the historical, political and cultural contexts in which it, and the African-American and American literary traditions upon which she draws, have been created and developed.

The book enacts a detailed and meticulously theorized study of Morrison’s fiction from her 1970 debut, The Bluest Eye (1970), to her tenth novel, Home (2012) ... [Baillie's] critical readings are often striking for their freshness ... Indeed, the book’s final chapter, on Love, A Mercy and Home, is a welcome and rare exploration of this “late phase” in the Morrisonian oeuvre. This last chapter on these often underdiscussed texts is tantalizingly short; I hope Baillie will return to discuss these in future work.

Justine Baillie is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich, UK. She has published on Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and American Fiction.