Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning

AN ANTHOLOGY THAT EXAMINES THE MANY ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE NOBEL LAUREATE Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the authors literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrisons career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrisons fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrisons focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Doves "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchezs "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo." ADRIENNE LANIER SEWARD, Colorado Springs, Colorado, is a professor in the English Department at Colorado College. She serves on the executive board of the Toni Morrison Society. JUSTINE TALLY, Tenerife, Spain, is a professor of American literature at the University of La Laguna. She is author of Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrisons (Hi)stories and Truths; The Story of Jazz: Toni Morrisons Dialogic Imagination; and Toni Morrisons "Beloved" Origins. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison.