The Voices of Toni Morrison - Softcover

Barbara Hill Rigney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814205550 ISBN 13: 9780814205556

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 1994

Synopsis

In her analysis of Morrison's five novels - Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Tar Baby - Rigney defines a black feminine/feminist aesthetic. The many "voices" of Toni Morrison, Rigney argues, are manifested in her radical use of language, her reformulations of self and identity, her reinterpretations of history as both fact and mythology, and her images of female desire. As Rigney describes Morrison's texts, they are characterized by deliberate and meaningful silences, by the movement beyond language into music, and by representations of magic realism and the conjure world. While Morrison's fictions disrupt traditional chronologies and diffuse linearity, they also bear historical witness to the realities and brutalities of slavery, reconstruction, depression, and war - and thus, Rigney documents, they are always profoundly political.
Rigney's study, like Morrison's novels, transcends traditional interpretations, maps new territory for postmodern fictions, and cultivates a common ground for a discourse on theory, race, and gender.

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Hill Rigney is professor of English at The Ohio State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0814205550
• ISBN 13: 9780814205556
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206