Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Southern Literary Studies)

This study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. 'Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle' portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins, between dominant America and its signifying other. Her novels are seen afresh as imagining a black community while revising the project of cultural nationalism from a black feminist perspective. Contents: The decolonizing vision: The Bluest Eye -- Freedom's absent Horizon: Sula -- Redeeming the legacy of the past: Song of Solomon -- On the rocking loom of history, a net to hold the past: Beloved -- A hearing of history: Jazz. Includes bibliography and index. This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison'The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz'situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins. Gurleen Grewal demonstrates how Morrison's novels perform a therapeutic and political function of recovery. What is most compelling about Morrison's fiction, Grewal posits, is its reevaluation of the individual via the complex sociopolitical heritage that bespeaks the individual. Ultimately, these fictive'circles of sorrow'invite the reader into the collective struggle of humankind who are living the long sentence of history by repeating, contesting, and remaking it. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins, between dominant America and its signifying/significant other. Her novels are seen afresh as imagining a black community while revising the project of cultural nationalism from a black feminist perspective. Written from a postcolonial feminist perspective, this adept analysis shows that Toni Morrison, far from evading feminism, enables us to map the complex allegiances of a black feminism that is neither antimale nor bourgeois, but critical of both black and white masculist discourses of violence that it must necessarily enter, understand, and transform. Grewal portrays Nobel laureate Toni Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins. This is an innovative blend of post-colonial and feminist theory, black literary history, and recent studies in trauma. Toni Morrison is part of a long black-and American-literary tradition that finds its full and complicated bloom in her art.