Bloomsbury Toni Morrison: Paradise, Love, A Mercy (Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction)

Toni Morrison features a collection of ten new essays by noted Morrison scholars, including recipients of the Toni Morrison Society Book Award. Focusing upon Morrison's most recently published novels (Paradise, Love, A Mercy) the contributors to this volume revisit issues that continue to engage Morrison and are part of the currency of contemporary American literary and cultural history. These selections examine Morrison's ongoing 'romance' with African Americans as they continue to battle the demons of race, gender, class, and poverty, to name a few. Together, these essays offer comprehensive and nuanced discussions of Morrison's latest novels and provide new directions for Morrison scholarship in the twenty-first century. This volume provides students of literature, cultural studies, and history with an overview of Morrison's examination of African American progress and leadership at key moments in American history and culture from the Colonial Period to the present. Through their thematic interconnectedness, the essays reveal Morrison at her most brilliant in her ability to reach into the past to comment on contemporary issues. Review 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. -- Riché Richardson, Associate Professor, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, USAMorrison scholar Lucille P. Fultz has assembled a collection of essays on the later works of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison by leaders in the field of Morrison scholarship. These beautifully written, varied, and provocative studies on Paradise, Love, and A Mercy provide readers with new vistas of exploration into the works of this literary giant. -- Suzanne Stutman, Ph.D. Professor of English, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Penn State University, Abington College, USA, and Secretary of the Board of Directors of The Toni Morrison Society About the Author 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.