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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature-- from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

"[Morrison] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."-- Chicago Tribune

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree --and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune , Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• 1 black matters
• 2 romancing The shadow
• 3 disturbing nurses and The kindness of sharks

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Morrison ( Jazz , LJ 4/15/92) believes that an African American presence, largely ignored by critics, has always permeated white American literature. She opens by carefully setting her parameters and defining her terms--e.g., Africanism: ``the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.'' The first few pages feature densely packed language whose meaning becomes clearer when Morrison examines such specific works as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl . This brief, highly provocative book, which considers ``the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,'' is highly recommended not only for Morrison's many admirers but for all those interested in American literature.--Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus , New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Novelist Morrison takes a turn as a literary critic, examining the American literary imagination and finding it obsessed with the white/black polarity. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This is a short volume comprising a preface and three chapters based on William E. Massey Sr. lectures given at Harvard University. Morrison, herself a renowned writer of fiction, is also the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, so she brings to her first collection of literary criticism the authority of academe as well as the penetrating insight of the creative writer and reader. Her purpose is to show how, "Explicit or implicit, the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature." The three chapters focus on specific works by, e.g., Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway. The vocabulary is literary and scholarly but distinctly not dogmatic or confrontational. As she states, "My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served." This book offers insight for all readers of American literature interested in understanding the complexity of the American psyche as revealed in literature. The perspective offered here is refreshing, unique, accessible, and bold. Appropriate for upper-division undergraduates and faculty. D. S. Isaacs; Fordham University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. She received a B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953 and a master's degree in English from Cornell University in 1955 with her thesis on the theme of suicide in modern literature. She taught at several universities including Texas Southern University, Howard University, and Princeton University.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Her other works include Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child. She has won several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1977, the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the Edward MacDowell Medal for her outstanding contribution to American culture in 2016, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. She also co-wrote children's books with her son, Slade Morrison, including The Big Box, The Book of Mean People, and Peeny Butter Fudge.

Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019 at the age of 88, after a short illness.

(Bowker Author Biography)