Toni Morrison

HOUSTON A BAKER Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania ANGELA BURTON at University of Leeds CYNTHIA A DAVIS feminist scholar MADHU DUBEY Assistant Professor of African-American Literature, Northwestern University, Illinois JENNIFER FITZGERALD Senior Lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast TERRY OTTEN Professor of English, Wittenberg University DOREATHA DRUMMOND MBALIA Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee RAFAEL PEREZ-TORRES Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania BARBARA HILL RIGNEY Professor of English, The Ohio State University EUSEBIO L RODRIGUES Professor of English, Georgetown University ASHRAF H A RUSHDY Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies, Wesleyan University

This New Casebook provides an overview of the criticism of work by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, and an introduction to the key works and issues in African-American literary scholarship.The novels of Toni Morrison, the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, are powerful not just because of their content - her themes include infanticide, rape, child abuse, murder and sexual jealousy - but because of their innovative form and language. This succinct critical introduction to her work seeks to make her novels more accessible to student and general reader alike through unravelling notions of self, representation and narrative structure which will be new to readers accustomed to Euro-American literary conventions.