Toni Morrison's 'Beloved': Origins

The enormous popularity of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987) has incited an extraordinary array of critical approaches. This study considers how Morrison's fifth novel initiates and works within what she has envisioned as her trilogy (comprising of Beloved, Jazz and Paradise). The author explores issues such as the relationship of Memory, History and Story, the location of Morrison as one of the foremost intellectuals of her time, who through her fiction is seen to be profoundly concerned with questions crucial to the postmodern debate taking place during the later decades of the twentieth century, and the idea that through her fiction Toni Morrison is also exploring the possibilities of literary theory.

Justine Tally is Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna, where she specializes in African American literature.