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Linden Peach, ed. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998. 211 pp. $18.95.
African American Review, Volume 34, Number 1 2000 Mary Hubbard
This New Casebook features eleven critical essays on the novels of Toni Morrison. Linden Peach's introduction provides an overview of each essay, identifying the theoretical perspectives from which each critic approaches Morrison's writing. Peach briefly yet clearly explains the origin and layers of sub-theories within each critical school. In addition, he specifies how the writers of these essays have modified traditional critical theories to interpret African American literature in general and Morrison's fiction in particular.
Peach also supplies explanatory notes following each essay and offers suggestions for further reading in the final pages of the book. This reading list features not only Morrison's fictional and critical works but also significant interviews, bibliographies, and literary criticism. In addition, articles and books examining Morrison's work are classified according to the contemporary critical approaches used.
In her intricate essay on Morrison's first three novels, Cynthia Davis interprets the "psychic violence" shown by many of Morrison's characters as a result of Western society's "systematic denial of the reality of black lives." Drawing upon existentialist and Marxist ideology, Davis shows how the "look of white society" so objectifies black members of society that they cannot form a "recognisable public self," exemplified by Morrison's pattern of misnaming people and places. Along similar lines, Barbara Rigney examines the "illusion of unified selfhood" in "Hagar's Mirror: Self and Identity in Morrison's...