Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

by ToniMorrison (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1993

  $4.68

  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature . Author of Beloved , The Bluest Eye , Song of Solomon , and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.