The Timeless Toni Morrison: The Past and The Present in Toni Morrison’s Fiction. A Tribute to Toni Morrison on Occasion of Her 85th Birthday (New Americanists in Poland)

The book presents a cultural study of Toni Morrison’s fiction, focused on her representations of the past and present, along with the relationship between the two. The authors analyze Morrison’s texts not solely as aesthetic, autonomous objects but as manifestations of a cultural and creative practice closely related to actuality. They examine various incorporations of history in Morrison’s writings. The contributions search out thematic continuities as well as discernable ruptures in the texts while noting futuristic tendencies in Morrison's novels and the texts’ envisagement of the human race. Cover Table of contents Introduction History Imagination and Truth How to Speak about the Unspeakable – Historical Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch) Biting Iron, Forever Smiling: the Iron-Bit, the Wounded Mouth, and Un-Silencing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Irina Popescu) Identity Moving Beyond the Veil of Double Consciousness: Making the Past, Present in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (Tammie Jenkins) From Essentialism to Choice: The Emergence and Intricacies of Contemporary Playful Racial Identities in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (Agnieszka Łobodziec) Pragmatic and Linguistic Functions in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Barbara Compagnucci) Challenging Master Discourses The Paradox of the Master Narrative: The Contradictory Voices of Toni Morrison’s Home (Stephanie Li) Constructing the Long, Lost Son: Multiply-Voiced Discourses in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (Misty Standage) ‘We Are the Furrow of His Brow’: Countering Mythic History in Morrison’s Paradise (Ji Hyun Lee) Challenging the Mirror of Whiteness: the Politics of Images and Sight in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (Blossom N. Fondo) About the authors This book offers broad contemporary perspectives with regard to Toni Morrison's fiction. The contributions engage on widely debated issues of current American discourse such as the ineradicability of historical memory, the intricacy of racial identity, and the role of literature in revealing profound truth.