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Reflections on the American Canon
Collected in one astonishing volume, Toni Morrison's explorations of the American literary canon.
Perhaps no novelist has meant more to contemporary fiction than Toni Morrison. And in addition to being a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, Morrison spent seventeen years as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching courses in African American studies, creative writing, and American literature.
Now, for the first time ever, Morrison's lectures on the American canon are compiled together, granting readers unprecedented access to Morrison's scholarship, critical eye, and relentless brilliance. Researching several of America's most famous works and authors, Morrison illuminates the relationships between race, the arts, and life beyond the page.
Morrison looks closely at Melville's Moby-Dick, Faulkner's South, McCullers's misfits, Stowe's sentiment, Hemingway's restraint. With an introduction from Morrison's colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory book that once again displays Morrison's intellectual and literary greatness.
"Provides unprecedented insight into Morrison's roles as cultural critic and thought leader...Morrison inverts our understanding of classic American literature...An insightful invitation to revisit the familiar with new eyes." —Booklist
"Deeply insightful investigations of major works." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Language as Liberation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. The volume of critical and popular acclaim that has arisen around the work of Toni Morrison is virtually unparalleled in modern letters. Her six major novels - The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz - have collected nearly every major literary prize. Ms. Morrison received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon. In 1987, Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her body of work was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Other major awards include: the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Pearl Buck Award (1994), the title of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (Paris, 1994), and 1978 ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Name Pronunciation
Toni Morrison: TOE-ni MAWR-uh-suhn
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