Five years after her death, Toni Morrison’s legacy continues to flourish. Her profound impact — not just as a novelist, but also as a critic and scholar — continues to inspire fresh assessments of and new approaches to literary criticism. This August, we celebrate the vital critical legacy of Toni Morrison with these five titles from Camden House.
Their range speaks to both the breadth and depth of Morrison’s impact on how we think about fiction, history, race, memory — and the self.
Winner of the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book, 2019-2022
Despite the ever-expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. This book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer. Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres—fiction, of course (novels and short stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics’ attitude toward American letters. This is the story of Morrison’s achievement in making a home for herself—and for other women and people of color—in the stony bedrock of “white male” American literature.
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What is a “musical novel”? Emily Petermann defines the genre as musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its form. The musical novel crosses medial boundaries, aspiring to techniques, structures, and impressions similar to those of music. It takes music as a model for its own construction, borrowing both techniques and forms. The musical novel also evokes performance by imitating elements of spontaneity that characterize improvised jazz or audience interaction.
The Musical Novel builds upon theories of intermediality and semiotics to analyze the musical structures, forms, and techniques in two groups of musical novels. The first group includes case studies of jazz novels by Toni Morrison.
George Orwell famously argued that those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past. In this study of the relationship between democracy and memory, P. J. Brendese examines Orwell’s insight, revealing how political power affects what is available to be remembered, who is allowed to recall the past, and when and where past events can be commemorated. Engaging a diverse panoply of thinkers that includes Sophocles, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Brendese considers the role of disavowed memory and the politics of collective memory in democratic processes throughout history. Chapters include “Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory”.
In Pluralist Desires, Philipp Löffler explores the contemporary historical novel in conjunction with three cultural shifts that affected political and intellectual life in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s: the end of the Cold War, the decline of postmodernism, and the re-emergence of cultural pluralism. Contemporary historical fiction and authorizes these developments by imagining the writing of history as a powerful form of world-making. Rather than ask whether history can ever be true, contemporary historical fiction investigates the uses of history for our individual lives.
Pluralist Desires reveals how major American novelists have appropriated the historical novel in the pursuit of selfhood rather than truth. Chapters include “After Race: Body Language and Historiography in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy”.
This forthcoming volume takes its cue from the emerging field of transparency studies, recent scholarly work in sociology, political theory, and cultural studies that identifies a hegemonic rhetoric of transparency in public and political life. It focusses on literary texts written in an American cultural tradition steeped in the interplay between transparency and exposure, fear and secrecy, security and surveillance, and information and disinformation.
The essays draw on authors ranging from Whitman, James, and Ellison to Pynchon, Morrison, and Eggers to argue that American literature complicates theoretical assumptions about transparency made in other disciplines. Chapters include “Secrecy and Exposure in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” by Alice Sundman.
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