Toni Morrison

Lucille P. Fultz is Associate Professor Emerita in English at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA. She is the author of Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference (2003) and the co-editor of Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991). She is the 2005 recipient of the Toni Morrison Society Book Award.

What an excellent and absorbing essay collection focused on three of the Toni Morrison's most recent novels. That these newer works have been taken up in critical analysis far less frequently than her earlier novels makes this volume all the more appealing, groundbreaking and revelatory. From Lucille Fultz's introduction, it captures the global significance of Morrison's legacy and the worldwide scale of its celebration-a byproduct of her literary brilliance that also speaks to her pivotal role in the globalization of the novel. Fultz offers solid contextualization for thinking about the novels in her introductory sections to each of the three major sections focused on them. She provides a rich framework for the array of remarkable essays and seamlessly orchestrates the voices of the talented critical ensemble that the volume includes. Essay to essay, it delivers richly theorized analyses drawing on multifaceted areas such as Foucauldian theory, psychoanalysis, masculinity studies and discourses on geography, along with topics such as silence, symbolism and mythology, and also includes probing and revealing close analysis of the novels. This rich volume makes a remarkable critical contribution to Morrison scholarship and is one of the very best published so far in the twenty-first century. It will be an indispensable tool for reading, research and teaching in the veritable field of "Morrison studies," along with fields such as American literature, African American literature, and women's literature, as well as a valuable resource for study of the novel as a genre.

• Series Editor’s IntroductionAcknowledgments1 Introduction: The Grace and Gravity of Toni Morrison, Lucille P. FultzPart I Paradise2 Separate Spheres?: The Appropriation of Female Space in Paradise , Shirley A. Stave3 The Working Through of the Disconsolate: Transformative Spirituality in Paradise, Gurleen Grewal4 Reclaiming the Presence of the Marginalized: Silence, Violence, and Nature in Paradise, Aoi MoriPart II Love5 “Some to Hold, Some to Tell”: Secrets and the Trope of Silence in Love, Carolyn Denard6 Power and Betrayal: Social Hierarchies and the Trauma of Loss in Love, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber7 The Power in “Yes”: Pleasure, Dominion, and Conceptual Doubling in Love , Herman BeaversPart III A Mercy8 Narrative Epistemology: Storytelling as Agency in A Mercy, Jami Carlacio9 “What Lay Beneath the Names”: The Language and Landscapes of A Mercy, Marc C. Conner10 Visions and Revisions of American Masculinity in A Mercy, Susan Neal MayberryNotes on ChaptersWorks Cited Further ReadingNotes on ContributorsIndex