Toni Morrison

An introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, this text focuses on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. It approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history, and argues that Morrison sees African-American history - from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the 20th century - as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet enlivening past. Morrison's novels are known for their lyric power, but they often dwell on scenes of horror, and this text emphasizes the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature.