Output details

Toni Morrison and literary tradition: The invention of an aesthetic

This monograph is the first full-length study in African-American scholarship to examine Toni Morrison’s inter-textual relationship with literary traditions, cultural forms and philosophical discourse. It has entailed extensive primary research on American folk discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, primitive modernism and pragmatist philosophy. Reading Morrison alongside these movements has illuminated her appropriation of freedom narratives, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Aesthetic and has provided new insight into both American and African-American literary deployments of ‘race’ as performative discourse and its connections with class, sexuality and diasporic identity.